


Division

by BalloonArcade



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Adult Content Misunderstandings, Alien Cultural Differences, Angst, Fluff, Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Misunderstandings, Past Child Abuse, Revenge of the Fallen AU, Tags May Change, human!Sunstreaker
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2018-10-28 13:41:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 40,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10832439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BalloonArcade/pseuds/BalloonArcade
Summary: Sideswipe emerged from the All Sparkdefective.Twitchy and aggressive, the Autobots took Sideswipe’s emergence as a warning to stop pumping out new sparks for war frames. His was the last spark forced from the All Spark before Optimus Prime sent it off to space.





	1. Pulse

Sol was intimately familiar with insanity.

At the age of ten he had watched his father’s slow descent into auditory and visual hallucinations peak as Sol had felt the hot splash of his mother’s blood across his face.

He’d learned later, as one of his many foster homes attempted to beat the insanity out of him, that his file stated his grandmother had done the same thing to her husband.

And his great grandfather had done it to his wife.

It was the reason Sol had promised himself resolutely that he would never form attachments to others, and he definitely would never have kids. 

His father’s enraged words to his mother about feeling empty and losing his starlight after Sol was born, resonated a little too well in him all his life.

Sitting directly behind his dark haired peer, Sol winced as he heard his first digital auditory hallucination, then watched the student in front of him tear through the astronomy textbook as if in a manic panic, and boldly declare Einstein was wrong.

And as Sol sat with his hand clenched tight around his stylus, watching a student in his class go insane on the blackboard correcting the Astronomy professor’s notes, babbling about seventeen dimensions and the base components of energon, he wonder if his inevitable hereditary violent insanity was transmittable.

He left the class shortly after the student, hands clenched tight into fists, as his stomach contorted and he swallowed down the vomit threatening to rise.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Sideswipe sunk his frame deeper onto his wheels as organics known as humans swarmed around him.

Guard duty made him extra twitchy.

From the moment he emerge from the All Spark he’d been twitchy and aggressive.

His was the last spark forced from the All Spark before Optimus Prime sent it off to space.

The Autobots had taken Sideswipe’s emergence as a warning to stop pumping out new sparks for war frames.

Sideswipe had emerged from the All Spark _defective_.

Sensors alerted Sideswipe to the Autobot pet Sam taking off out of the building he had entered, and Sideswipe suppressed a soft growl of his engine. That human may have destroyed Megatron, but he had destroyed the All Spark with him.

And Sideswipe had had a vendetta with the All Spark that could never be resolved.

Tracking the human on sensors, he waited until he was some distance away before he started his engine to follow. Bumblebee was still ghosting around somewhere, but _officially_ Sideswipe was on guard duty.

Something about learning to bond with the squishy Optimus seemed to hold in high regard.

So Sam’d snuffed Megatron. Big deal.

Sideswipe had been snuffing sparks since emergence.

He didn’t see what the big deal was about the squishes either, but all the other Autobots seemed to have collected one.

They infested the Autobot base and Sideswipe had horrible detailed visions of what might happen to one if he rolled over it with his wheeled pedes.

Like the rabbit he had accidentally hit on a road once, it would probably take days to clean out.

Grumbling to himself as his engine revved to life, he threw himself into reverse only to freeze as his spark pulsed, sending charge and contentment through his systems in a way he had never felt before. His peripheral sensors snapped his attention to a squishy leaving the same building Sam had just exited.

He scanned it. 

Elevated heart rate, fluid oozing out of its dermal layer, Sideswipe watched in equal parts fascination and disgust as the squishy bent over behind a bush, heaved and leaked chunky organic fluid from its intake.

Humans were absolutely repulsive.

Everything about them squished, and oozed.

This one in particular it seemed.

Impulsive actions, and defying orders were considered _normal_ for Sideswipe. Ratchet had hit him on the helm enough times to try and instill a sense of self safety on the battle field, and Ironhide had attempted the much the same with his cannons.

But Sideswipe never could quite fit into words and explain to them that the only time he felt a semblance of whole was when he was dancing at the threshold of the Well. Fighting viciously for his own survival was the only time the constant aching void in his spark felt a minutiae of peace.

Something indescribable was missing from Sideswipe - something that no one else seemed to feel or understand, and its absence frustrated and infuriated him constantly.

So instead of following Sam like he was assigned to do, Sideswipe did something decidedly impulsive and against orders as he was accustomed.

Turning off his comms, he followed his spark.

Stalking that human, Sideswipe riveted his sensors to his every disgusting organic movement.

Because for a moment, when his peripheral sensors scanned over that disgusting spewing flesh bag, the ache in his spark had _stopped_ and his spark felt complete, before the brief feeling flit away in a single pulse.

In that brief moment, his spark told Sideswipe that particular human belonged to him.


	2. Starlight

Sol had been fascinated by the stars for as long as he could remember. 

His father had been very much the same. 

There weren’t many stars visible in New Jersey, but both of them had still always looked. Laying on their backs on a picnic table, his father taught him the brightest constellations that survived through the haze of human progress. 

It wasn’t until he was almost ten when Sol finally saw all the stars in the little dipper. “The Great Northern Hockey Stick,” his dad would joke as he taught him to find the north star. In the city, ursa minor certainly didn’t look like a dipper, or a minor bear.

When he was almost ten his father had taken him, just the two of them, up to Algonquin Park in Canada on a two week long canoe trip. 

Sol had been miserable. The mosquitos descended upon him in a never ending high pitched hum, the black flies swarmed and chewed around his bandana he wore in an attempt to keep them out of his hair, the moose were _huge_ and had scared the shit out of him, and he had had to dig a pit for his shit literally. 

Blisters formed on his sunburnt hands as they continued to paddle further and further into the interior, and he struggled to help hold the canoe at all during portages between lakes as his boots sucked down into mud. 

They filtered their water to drink directly from the lake and Sol had been repulsed, didn’t his father know that fish peed in that!?

Every night they would sit around a fire, Sol with his hoodie pulled tight over his head, despite the humidity and fire, to keep the mosquitoes from continuing to consume him. There was no cell signal to be had, and his phone battery had long since died.

Every night it was cloudy. 

On the final night, at the point in which they would no longer be going in to the massive network of lakes but diverting course back toward their car, Sol woke up to his father shaking his shoulder in the dead of night. Sol pulled his hood up tight as he crept out of the tent behind his father, wordless through the pitch dark, the coals of their fire having long been extinguished, to the shoreline. There the dark shape of his father picked him up and placed him in the canoe. The only sound above the high pitched whine of mosquitoes was the soft scrap of the canoe as his father pushed it forward, then jumped in after him. 

In the middle of the lake, Sol pulled off his hood and gaped. There were no mosquitos, and that night the water was so still, as soon as they stopped paddling, the starlight appeared to emit from the lake itself in the mirrored reflection.

Sol had never seen so many stars.

The balls of fire literally billions of light years away illuminated the night and he struggled to find any recognizable constellations as he felt like he were dancing among them. 

He and his father had sat back to back in the canoe and stared up for hours. 

It was August. 

The perseid meteor showers were at their peak; streaks of burning light trailed around them and Sol was lost, staring out at the milky way as if staring out into eternity under the force of the light of billions of burning suns. 

That moment, surrounded by starlight on all sides was the closest Sol had ever come to feeling complete.

As he walked along a sidewalk, light-headed and trembling, he tossed his astronomy textbook into the trash, trying not to think about the waste or the money he could get at the beginning of the semester for selling it used. 

He’d scrapped together enough money to buy the obscenely priced textbook - he’d been in the class, but he certainly didn’t go to Princeton. 

The professor was a disgusting creep anyway, he thought to himself as a way to make the sharp twist and gnawing emptiness inside him hurt less. 

Pulling his backpack up on his shoulder, Sol shoved his shaking fists into his leather jacket that had belonged to his father as he stalked through campus toward the nearest bus stop to take him far away from this pretentious hellscape.

Back to the other hellscape where he tried to tell himself he belonged.

Clenching his jaw tight, he tried to shake the skittering noise of tinny data that scrapped across his brain. 

_It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real._

His father had spoke about _hearing data_ , _hearing numbers_ , before he had started _seeing things_ after Sol was born, and until that moment in the astronomy class, Sol had had no idea what data sounded like. 

But he knew without a doubt that’s what he had just heard. 

It didn’t make any sense. He had done everything right. 

As soon as he had learned about his family history in his file, Sol had gone to the library and looked up news and court records. Printing them, he hid them in a can he buried up the road of his foster home.

He’d been twelve. 

When he was hiding in the bushes of a park from his extremely devout foster parents, who were convinced Sol’s family had made a pact with the devil, he’d pull out that can with shaking hands and study the pages as tears streaked down his face. 

Air brakes hissed in front of him, jolting him from his thoughts. He’d walked on autopilot to his destination without thought. That was normal for him too. 

Traveling to New York once, he had attempted to get lost. But he’d made the mistake of looking at a map. 

One of his good foster parents had encouraged him toward art therapy when she and her wife had discovered Sol’s uncanny ability to look at an object and replicate it almost precisely on paper.

Once he knew the visual layout of a place it was as if Sol had his own private GPS navigation that would nudge him in the right direction even when he didn’t pay attention.

Another trait his father had claimed to have before Sol was born.

A sharp rev of a pretentious rich ass sports car pierced into his ears at the same time he _heard_ a data hallucination skitter across his brain, and he winced at the overwhelming auditory assault as he stepped onto the bus. 

Drawn to the back left corner of the bus, he pulled his leather jacket tighter around him, his back pack hugged tight in front of him, as he rested his forehead on the dingy glass to glared unseeing out the window.

_It’s not real. It’s not real. You are breaking the pattern._

By the time he was sixteen he had hoped he had figured out a pattern from those disturbing documents on his family’s past so the same descent into madness didn’t happen to him. 

His great grandfather, his grandmother, and his father had all been different ages when the snapped violently, lashing out toward their spouse, screaming that they had lost their starlight. Screaming and tearing into their spouse, demanding that they give it back, that they should have made them feel less empty, they were meant to be soul mates. 

They were all different ages. 

But their _children_ were all the same age. 

Ten. 

To the day, down to the hour. 

Except it had started with his great grandfather. 

That seemed important for some reason. 

But Sol couldn’t even figure out where the man had worked. 

Though he did know the man had lived in Nevada.

Sol’s best theory was that it was some kind of hereditary radiation degradation of the brain, some kind of mutation that formed from nuclear missile tests.

They did those kinds of things in Nevada right?

No matter how hard he tried though, the words of that one particular foster home of religious fanatics would repeat in his head as the true reason. 

_Evil. Satan spawn. Repent. Tainted soul. Sun worshiping heathens._

Words seemingly carved into his brain as they had been whipped, starved, burned, and carved in to flesh as he lay bound and naked, spread eagle on the bed for exorcism after exorcism. 

He’d only been with them four months before his caseworker discovered the abuse. 

But the scars were life long. 

If there were such a thing as a soul, which Sol would venously deny existed, his would be in tattered shreds.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

::HEY! HEY YOU! BUSATRON DRONE! MOVE YOUR FRAGGING GIANT AFT - WAIT! STOP! THAT’S MY DISGUSTING HUMAN!!! ARRRRG!::

Sideswipe revved his engine in a frustrated fury, screaming to himself out of his speakers, as that human got on a bus and he had to resort to separate scanners without visual observation.

Again.

He’d trailed after his human a few car lengths behind him as he weaved his way through campus. The human tossed some kind of wood pulp into the trash and continued on paths Sideswipe wasn’t _allowed_ to drive on.

It was ridiculous. 

He could definitely fit on those brick streets. How stupid were the flesh bags!? 

Sideswipe hadn’t been on this organic dirt ball long, but as soon as he’d landed, the Autobots had chased him down on a highway, swarming him and ordering him to base. There Optimus had him upload the stupid _Welcome to Earth_ data packet and there were _rules_.

The most irritating one Optimus had been extremely firm on before Sideswipe was even allowed to leave the base, was Sideswipe was to act like a human drone car.

For a mech built for speed, been on a battlefield since his emergence, and chased the high of dancing recklessly at the edge of the Well, it was a physically painful long hour as Sideswipe followed behind that bus.

Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. 

Sideswipe rocked on his wheels - twitchy. That human was starting to frag him off. 

Not only did he _not_ get off the bus yet, but he wouldn’t even _look_ when another lane was clear beside them and Sideswipe would drive up and draft the left side of _Busatron’s_ giant aft.

Even more aggravating: Sideswipe’s spark felt like it ached _worse_ now knowing what had been denied him, he still hadn’t felt that hot charge of contentment pulse through his spark again, and he didn’t know how to get the human to repeat it.

Revving his engine irritably a bus behind him honked, and that human _finally_ got off the bus. Within visual scanners again the human tossed his cloth subspace on his back, and Sideswipe’s spark raced in anticipation as it headed toward him.

The bus behind him honked again and Sideswipe honked back, trying his best to be a perfectly presentable normal human drone car to attract that human closer to him so he could flick his sensors over him again, and hopefully figure out how to properly activate his thankfully no longer leaking human. 

Honking excessively seemed to be working, his human was even looking at him, and then the squishy opened his mouth to speak him and his spark -

“You’re in a bus depot you idiot!”

\- sank as his human walked right past him and got on the bus behind him. 

Another squishy came by and its greasy digits _touched_ his windshield wipers once they realize no human was inside. 

The bus behind him pulled out, and Sideswipe peeled out after it, pink wood pulp fluttering under his windshield wiper. 

Activating them, it flew off, lost to the wind as he chased desperately after his spark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The perseid meteor showers were at their peak; streaks of burning light trailed around them and Sol was lost, staring out at the milky way as if staring out into eternity under the force of the light of billions of burning suns._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _That moment, surrounded by starlight on all sides was the closest Sol had ever come to feeling complete._
> 
>  
> 
> Thus I sow the seeds for Sol's Cybertronian name.


	3. Spark Ache

::SERIOUSLY!? A THIRD BUS! COME ON!!!!::

If Sideswipe was in his root mode he’d be glaring hot lasers at his human farther up the street.

Watching as his human boarded a _third_ bus, Sideswipe twitched on his wheels, resisting the urge to transform in the middle of a busy street, cut off the top of the bus and snatch his human out of it so he could shake it to make it work.

Revving his engine to share his displeasure at the all the squishies around him, and all their primus damned rules, he activated his indicator and wedged in front of the car behind him to his left. Making lane changes, always indicating his intent, he _completely legally_ darted through traffic to close the distance between himself and that bus.

Humans in their drone cars honked a lot this time of day it seemed, so he always honked too in response.

At this point Sideswipe was starting to consider that human _lived_ on a bus. And he had to admit, he hadn’t actually entered the human area of base; couldn’t actually fit into the human area of base.

And he hadn’t cared enough to scan it. 

Could humans live on buses?

Bumblebee’s pet Sam lived at the school, but did _some_ humans live on buses?

Where did they keep their disgusting designated leaking room _in_ a bus?

_Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew._

Sideswipe shuddered on his chassis as he continued following a _third_ bus and tried frantically to delete that line of code from his cortex. 

The bus took an unexpected left turn without signaling its intent or being in the proper lane, and Sideswipe’s spark pounded against its casing as he worked on _very legally_ looping around to catch back up while it dropped out of visual sensors. 

One way streets, no right turns on red lights, organic fleshies pedaling on two wheels, greasy oozy squishises crossing in designated zones, surrounded him as he dashed; trapping him in an infuriating net of rules and regulations as his spark ache increased with every rotation. Pacing the bus that was stealing his human away on a parallel street, with three city blocks between them, it got on an on ramp for a freeway, and his human dropped out of his extended sensor range. 

Frantically, _very legally_ signaling his intent, he darted in and out of traffic, honking his horn to blend in with the others, to catch up.

Seconds ticked by on his chronometer as he diverted systems to stretch his sensor net. 

Each second, normally such an insignificant small blip in the life of a Cybertronian. 

Each second, wrenching on his aching spark.

Thirty-six seconds stretched out into eternity.

Following Sam, it hadn’t bothered Sideswipe when he dropped off his sensor net. Sideswipe could easily track him on scanners when out of sight, but if he dropped off his sensor net for a few minutes it wasn’t a big deal as Sideswipe caught up.

A few minutes was hardly a blip to Sideswipe’s lifetime.

But for some reason _that_ human, _his_ human was different.

In those thirty-six seconds with his human out of his sensor net his cortex worked triple time. 

What if he lost his human?

What if he never found it again?

What if the bus got hit, and the flexible dermal layer exploded into a spray of ooze?

_What if, what if, what if._

Each probable scenario running through his processor rent deep in his spark.

Thirty-six seconds and there was finally a blip on his sensor net and he scanned his human on thermal imaging as he darted on the freeway _slightly_ less legally, at eighty-five miles per hour to catch up. 

A heart beat.

To calm his own aching spark, he played the heart beat he could record of that particular human through his speakers into his empty passenger compartment, and drown out the honking of the humans in their drone cars around him as he darted through any gap he could fit.

Continuing to follow his potentially bus dwelling human off the freeway, Sideswipe’s sensors registered the drone vehicles lining the streets and he cringed. 

Thankfully this was not a place he had to get an alt mode. 

Sam’s school had a delightful assortment of fast vehicles he could examine, but these ones - he recoiled and clamped tighter on his frame - was that RUST!?

Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Stop.

His human came out the the third fragging bus and leaked out of its intake all over the pavement.

_UGH. Why?!_

That was the leakiest, ooziest human he’d ever seen.

Sideswipe was going to have to encase it in something.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Sol winced as multiple horns blared in the traffic behind the bus again and he rested his head in his hands.

Saliva filled his mouth, and his stomach churned as he was forced to swallow it down instead of spit. At this point he just hoped he could make it home before he started to vomit as he clenched his eyes tight to cut out the light, despite having already placed his sunglasses on his face. 

By the time he boarded the third bus and final bus home, his vision had started to blur, half of people’s faces began to disappear, and as far as his brain was concerned, if he wasn’t actively touching his left arm, it no longer existed. 

A migraine. 

The doctors had told his father he was too young for migraines when three year old Sol was first brought screaming into to the emergency room, crying that he couldn’t see, he’d lost his arm, and the side of his head was trying to burst off. 

As Sol had sat in a dark examination room, vomiting violently into a metal kidney bean shaped pan every ten minutes until he had nothing left but bile - then even that gave way to dry heaves - the doctors had the nerve to say Sol was faking for attention.

His father had told the doctor to suck it. He got migraines, Sol’s grandmother had gotten migraines - though neither of their migraines were allegedly as violent as Sol’s.

Currently it felt like half his scalp had gone to _sleep_ , tingling like a foot on a leg that had been crossed too long, though it did nothing to numb the feeling of an ice pick hammering to escape the inside of his skull behind his left eye.

The bus lurched to a stop and so finally did his stomach. 

Knowing this was his stop without looking, he stood up and rushed out the door, pushing protesting strangers out of his way as liquid began to seep from between his fingers under the force of the first muscle contraction of his abdomen. 

A wet splatter cascaded on the pavement. Heaving again his body started to sweat under the strain and the disgusted comments from other passengers about being drunk or on drugs got lost in the auditory and visual assault of traffic noise, revving engines, air brakes and sunlight glinting off reflective surfaces. 

Attempting to rub his hand clean on the grass he pulled his jacket over his head to block out the light as he squinted down at the sidewalk, stumbling the straightest possible path to his apartment with half his vision blocked by a tinfoil like iridescent shaped blob. 

Fumbling his keys, it took three tries to get it into the lock that was blotted out of his vision. Closing the door to the main entryway muffled the incessant honking and engine revving coming from the street behind him. 

Hauling himself up the stairs to the third floor, he felt saliva well in his mouth again as his body shot hot and he fumbled to unlock the three deadbolts on his door. 

Once inside he twisted and slid locks into place, dropped his bag, emptied a trash can onto the floor, and huddled over it as he heaved again. Each heave increasing the pressure in his head until a blissful few minutes of slight relief of the explosion inside his skull. 

Shaking and cold once the vomit cycle was spent, he hauled himself to his sink to quickly wash his hands, pulled his black out curtains down, stumbled to his bed, and collapsed on it with his trash can full of vomit beside him. 

There he shoved his head under a pillow and wished the world outside his window would stop being so loud.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Sideswipe sunk onto his chassis.

He had tracked his leaky disgusting human on his scanners after he entered the building, found the window to the room his human was in and parked by it. 

There he kept his sensors locked tight and reconsidered his plan to keep honking and revving his engine. 

Thermal imaging showed that his fleshie had balled up on his berth despite it being the day cycle for humans, and anywhere between ten to twenty minutes he'd leak from his intake into a bucket. 

After the sixth hour of Sideswipe twitching uncomfortably in his parking space, his human no longer leaked, but still tried to, and Sideswipe made a dangerous decision. 

He turned on his comms, encrypted his signal, and called Ratchet.

::Ratchet, how much are humans suppose to leak?::

A few seconds past as Sideswipe scanned his human that seemed to be trying to leak but couldn't. He had been told that humans fueled frequently and his hadn't shoved organic fuel down his intake at all since he first locked scanners on him. 

::Sideswipe, we explained Sam's daily bodily functions to you::

Gross. Not _those_. 

Sideswipe still couldn't believe the Autobots let the humans sit in them. Sam tried to explain that it didn't just fall out, and no one would listen when Sideswipe maintained human cloth porous coverings couldn't possible work as a cap to keep it in. 

It was even worse when Ironhide told Sideswipe that Annabelle was too young and didn't count. 

::Yea, but you didn't tell me humans leaked organic ooze out their intake.:: 

::Is Sam okay?!?::

Who the frag cared about _Sam_? 

::Sam's fine.:: Well he had been when Sideswipe last saw him.

::Did you scan his fuel for abnormalities? Bumblebee stated Sam had consumed poisoned food once. His body purged his stomach from his intake, and bowels for twenty four hours.::

Oh. So humans _could_ eject fluid from their intake, and apparently survive for up to twenty-four hours in that state.

::Thanks Ratchet.::

::Sideswipe, is Sam purging?::

::No. I’m observing a separate fleshie from Sam’s school. This one oozes and leaks a lot.:

::Sideswipe it is rude to call them fleshies we went over this.:: Ratchet’s scolding tone left no room for argument.

Scowling internally, Sideswipe didn’t respond. Fleshie was an accurate description. Humans simply were so…fleshie. And squishy. 

What kind of horrible random organic biological evolution allowed a creature to become sentient when they kept their most armored components of their body _internally_ in stead of externally. 

It was just backwards.

Sideswipe was always waiting for them to just randomly pop apart half the time.

What if they got scratched or poked?

Did their skin retract like thin stretched tubing, snapping away so everything sloshed out?

Ratchet sighed into the comms system.

::The human most likely consumed large amounts of ethanol. Sam warned us humans on his campus would frequently indulge in it. I have scanned some of the soldiers on base when they consume it. In larger amounts it has a similar effect of hi-grade on their systems. Larger consumption can result in purging it from their systems from their intake, and toxicity of their neuro-net.::

::Oh.::

::Humans function quite differently than us but there are a lot of parallels. Optimus will be pleased to hear you are finally taking an interest.::

Irritated now that his human had potentially consumed poisoned food or consumed enough ethanol to compromise his neuro-net, Sideswipe ended his transmission and locked down his comms signal again.

Steaming silently to himself as his human went forty-seven minutes without attempting to leak out his intake again, a third group of humans surrounded Sideswipe.

Like all the rest, their tools snapped and broke as they attempted to detach his tires. A thin strip of metal was shoved callously down by his window toward his locking mechanism in his door again and Sideswipe had enough of the constant empty ache in his spark.

Setting off all his lights and a high pitch alarm, he revved his engine as he slammed open both doors in two of their faces. Armored plating cringed as his sensors felt fleshie greasy nasal ridges crumple against his plating.

Reversing, he drove over the tip of a pede and circled in a fuming fury in the parking lot.

The pack of humans fled but Sideswipe didn’t stop.

Tires squealing, engine revving, he tried to desperately to stop that disjointed ache that had taunted him in his spark since his emergence from the All Spark.

Humans yelled out windows, tiny humans started to make horrible wailing noises that grated on his sensors but Sideswipe kept going, trying to forcefully burn the ache out of his spark.

Objects were thrown in his direction and he dodged them, spinning in circles with squealing tires; ghosting millimeters past parked car drones.

Spinning, twisting, revving; Sideswipe’s spark spun and coiled tight in its casing before he flared it out in a fury and - 

_Thud._

Something bypassed his sensors net and hit him square on his wind shield. Screeching to a halt, startled as that hot flare of contentment pulsed through his spark again in the same instant that object shot through his sensors.

“Would you shut the fuck up? The Esquivels have school in the morning dick wad.”

All his sensors on every spectrum jerked toward his not-currently-leaky human scowling out a window toward him.

Aiming to impress, Sideswipe obediently parked himself in the parking space outside his human’s window and flashed his lights once in greeting to his chosen pet.

In response his human slammed his window shut and pulled down coverings.

Sinking down dejectedly on his wheels again Sideswipe reconsidered his approach.

How had the other Autobots gained their pet human’s trust so they could gain clearance to know about the Autobots?

Those instructions were not in the _Welcome to Earth_ data packet and Sideswipe suspected he had not been given the instructions because Optimus had not cleared him to get his own human pet. Probably never would approve if he asked, based on Sideswipe's reputation.

But clearly, this one was meant to be his.

Searching the human data net yielded little clear information of how to gain a human pet, and Sideswipe cringed as he avoided the shear overwhelming amount of data showing the humans were positively _obsessed_ with their fluids. 

Running his engine on silent, he backed out of the space and drove toward the object his human had given him and scanned it for significance.

Opening his left door, he extended a cable out toward it. Pulling it inside, he placed it perfectly center in his passenger seat and darted his sensors around at ever angle and spectrum.

The rest of the human night cycle past with the sound of his human’s heart beat emitting through his internal speakers to himself, as Sideswipe cross examined the human data net to find the cultural significance of being gifted an object known as “a boot” containing an iron alloy insert.

Perhaps this _boot_ was the key to activating his human; Sideswipe's spark had flared as it hit him.

Somehow this repulsive fleshie was the solution to ending Sideswipe’s constant spark ache that had aggravated and infuriated him since the fragging All Spark spit him out defective and smaller than all the others.

And so far, according to the human data net, wrapping his human pet in rubber seemed to be the solution for containing its excessive amount of fluids it leaked.

Because no matter how disgustingly leaky his human could be, Sideswipe needed to find a way to capture his destined soon-to-be pet human and activate it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All hail the sacred steel-toed boot of spark pulsing reverence. 
> 
> This is the scene I wrote as I was sick this week and delusionally dreamed human!Sunstreaker throwing a boot at Sideswipe to shut him up, and Sideswipe going "oooo gift from human, what does it mean?"


	4. Congruent

The thudding of children’s feet on the ceiling above him woke Sol forty-five minutes before his alarm.

Groaning, he tossed his pillow off his head and worked his tongue to dispel the pasty dry feeling of cotton filling his mouth. Running his tongue over his teeth, he wrinkled his nose at the fuzzy feeling and the scent of stale vomit and sweat. 

Pushing himself off his mattress on the floor, he grabbed his trash can, along with dish soap, and brought it to the bathroom to dump its contents down the toilet. He’d learned over the years he often couldn’t make it to the toilet fast enough to vomit during his migraines so it was better just to commit to using his trash can.

No matter how repulsive the next day.

Filling the empty pail with dish soap, he sprayed it out in the shower and let it sit as he pushed his face under the tap of the bathroom sink to swish water around and rinsed out his mouth.

Brushing his teeth - twice - became the first order of business to combat the pasty rancid death his breath had become, despite how much his stomach growled for food. Gulping down water from the tap afterward to fill his stomach and work on rehydrating his body, he peeled off his rank clothes and jumped in the shower before the Esquivel hoard above him began to use all the hot water in their apartment stack.

Leaning his head against the shower wall for a moment, he let the hot spray cascade down his back and rolled his neck to work out the tightness in his muscles that descended from sleeping with his head under his pillow in an attempt to shut off the world.

As he lay curled up on his bed between vomiting, sometimes he was able to fall asleep to partially escape the throbbing pain. 

That sleep was never restful. 

Full of half lucid dreams, the neurological firing and constricting of blood vessels of a migraine could give him temporary synesthesia in which numbers and dates had a spacial sequence. 

This time he had seen the nonsensical shapes and figures that dark haired student had frantically written on the chalk board in what Sol’s half asleep synesthesia state had conceived in multiple dimensions. 

Seventeen dimensions to be exact. 

Thinking through the pain, as he lay pulling his hair to give his mind a separate sensation of pain to focus on other than the pounding in his skull, Sol had convinced himself that what he had heard at Princeton had been a precursor to his migraine.

A prodrome: the warning his brain was already entering the migraine state.

 _Not_ hearing data. 

It couldn’t be.

It didn’t matter that he’d never identified a prodrome warning symptom before, but he knew auditory distortions like ringing in an ear could be one. 

Certainly that’s all the uncomfortable tinny skittering across his brain and in his ears had been. 

_He wasn’t going insane. He was breaking the pattern._

That noise had just been the auditory center of his brain malfunctioning. 

Over the years he’d researched migraines at the library to attempt to determine his triggers.

Caused by overstimulation and hyper-excitability in the area of the brain that processed senses, Sol considered them his brain’s way of backfiring through neurons to relieve a build up of emotional stress. 

Because while he had vomited up every over the counter medication he had ever tried, and certainly couldn’t afford the one hundred dollar price tag of injectables to lessen the symptoms, the best part about getting a migraine for Sol was how _good_ he would inevitably feel the next day. 

He knew that wasn’t normal.

But it was normal for _Sol_.

All the research he had done spoke of sufferers with the neurological disorder of migraines experiencing the equivalent of a hangover the next day.

A postdrome.

Sol always felt refreshed, once he no longer felt starving and dehydrated, like some build up of pressure in his skull had been expelled along with whatever was in his stomach.

Refreshed after he’d scrubbed his body clean of the stale sweat anyway. 

Attempting to be courteous to his neighbours above and below, he didn’t linger in the shower nearly as long as he wished despite how cleansing the hot steam felt inhaled into his raw throat and lungs. 

What he wouldn’t give to one day be able to afford a place with a bathtub instead of this corner stand up shower. Preferably a place without the black mold he constantly tried to fight with bleach.

One day, he promised himself. 

Jaw clenched tight, he stepped out of the shower, and caught the sharp edge of steel resolve behind his eyes. Capturing him, he stared hard at his own reflection in his bathroom mirror, as if there existed a tangible force in his existence he could rage against. 

One day he’d save enough money to move out of the city; find a place away from others with still water and open sky.

No attachments. 

He wouldn’t go insane.

He was breaking the pattern. 

And one day he’d burn through that cold, dank pit of intangible frustrated emptiness welling deep at his core by encompassing himself in the primal force of billions of raging suns and endless streaks of falling starlight.

A rumble in his stomach broke his piercing focus away from his reflection with a blink, and he shook his head to dispel the brief instant in which his eerie blue eyes had caught the overhead lighting under his own challenging gaze, the whisper of peace he had felt once upon a time fading back to memory.

To move out of the city, he needed money. Which meant he needed to retrieve his god damn steel-toed boot he hurled at that drunk fucker spinning donuts around his building last night.

Janine had already taken a risk in hiring Sol, apprenticing him when he held no certifications. She’d be pissed if he showed up without the proper safety gear in her shop. 

Eggs sizzled on his one functional stovetop element, oatmeal cooked in the microwave and Sol’s stomach grumbled again despite the spoon of peanut butter already hanging from his mouth. Pulling his bread out of the fridge, where he kept all his food safe from attracting cockroaches or mice, he made himself a couple of peanut butter and jam sandwiches for the day. 

And he smirked to himself briefly as he imagined that dick wad’s flashy chromed sports car was bound to be on concrete blocks by now. 

With any luck, Sol could start his day by laughing his ass off at the idiot who thought it was a smart idea to park a customized _Corvette_ in Sol’s neighbourhood.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

“Lucky fucker, but you won’t survive another night in one piece. Probably won’t even last the day.”

Sideswipe stayed perfectly still as his human approached him, leery now under its intense glare and what sounded like a threat towards him when it exited its dwelling.

Human things were set on the ground to the side of the parking lot, then it walked around the parking lot, but not directly _too_ Sideswipe.

Yet.

Through the extensive analysis of the boot in his front passenger seat, Sideswipe reviewed every data recording and angle of that boot's approach. It had hit him impeccably while he had been spinning out in motion, and Sideswipe’s sensors hadn’t registered the impending projectile.

That bit of data snagged in his cortex, and he’d been running diagnostics to clarify his sensor net contained no holes from the moment he registered his human's movement in the day cycle.

Thankfully it seemed his human had ceased its incessant leaking from its intake, or _mouth_ according to his research. Hopefully it was finished purging the poisoned food or toxic amount of ethanol it consumed. More importantly, Sideswipe’s spark had flared briefly again after his human had exited its washracks, and he was hoping his human might activate properly so Sideswipe could determine the sequence of variables to make it function correctly for him.

Sensors locked tight on its every movement through the parking lot, Sideswipe played at being a perfectly normal human drone car. 

Careful not to spook it, Sideswipe’s new strategy of not honking and revving his engine for attention worked.

His human approached closer, circled him, looked underneath him, then spoke with a hiss.

“That fuck wad took my boot. Fuck dammit.” 

Was Sideswipe not suppose to have taken the boot that caused his spark to flare? 

Frag that.

Pulling his doors tighter, he continued scanning his human. Sideswipe was keeping the boot, just in case.

Running its fleshy hand through its collection of dead cell filaments protruding from its head, his human huffed, “I don’t have time for this shit, maybe Tuan has a second pair.”

Stalking back toward its pile of human junk, Sideswipe analyzed every twitch and disgusting fleshy movement hoping to determine _how_ to activate his human and keep it properly activated, as it started attaching cloth and plastic to its wrists.

“Did we miss it? Did he go yet?” Hushed whispers from mini-humans entered Sideswipe’s sensor range. Greasy faces pressed against glass inside his human’s dwelling and the mini-humans looked around until they spotted his human sitting on the step as it put on oddly shaped boots. 

A _him_ then. 

Sideswipe hadn’t been certain if his human was male or not. Biologically it possessed the components for male, but gender among humans appeared complicated based on the human pet forums he had accessed for research on the earth data net.

Those were the forums where he found the recommendation for encasing his human in a rubber suit. Sideswipe had even found a suit that came with plugs to stop up potential leaks. 

Apparently _some_ humans had the decency to agree with Sideswipe that their leaking lines couldn’t be trusted to be kept shut and should be capped off. 

Though a substance known as cellophane seemed more readily available. The back of his processor was still running an analysis of _how_ Sideswipe was going to obtain either the rubber suit or cellophane for his human before he allowed it - _him_ \- in his interior.

An engine revved from the street, voices called out.

“C’mon nut job. You want a jump start or not?”

It wasn’t until his human stood back up and _rolled_ forward that Sideswipe’s spark jumped. 

Not a pulse but…

Tossing the cloth subspace on his back, his human gave one final probing look around Sideswipe, then spun in a tight circle to gather his final belongings. 

His expression was blocked as he placed flimsy reflective golden armor on top of his head, but for a brief moment, Sideswipe _swore_ his sensors detected a slight lift to the corner of his mouth.

Sideswipe’s spark ache increased, straining and twisting against its casing at the sight before him.

 _Wheels._

His human had detachable wheeled pedes.

Straining to process this unexpected development, Sideswipe stayed riveted to his visual scanners, unable to move as he internally gaped at the congruency.

Snatching a metal pole with a hook at the end off the ground, his human darted off on _wheeled pedes_ after that revving car packed full of humans. 

Sideswipe reset his visual sensors as his human chased after the car, hooked onto the left wheel well, crouched, and _drafted_ the car down the middle of the street. 

But Sideswipe’s cortex was trapped in a processing loop along with his aching spark.

His human had detachable wheeled pedes. 

His human had detachable wheeled pedes.

His human had detachable wheeled pedes…

Wheeled pedes.

Four tiny wheels on each.

_SIDESWIPE'S HUMAN HAD WHEELED PEDES!!!_

Throwing himself into reverse, Sideswipe peeled out after him with screeching tires, the boot flying across his seats as his cortex worked triple time.

His human was already three blocks away up the street.

Accelerating after him, Sideswipe struggled to keep pace as his human darted _very illegally_ among traffic. 

His human - _Sideswipe’s very squishy soon-to-be pet human_ \- squeezed tight between cars, crouched behind bumpers, hopped up onto curbs before darting back between lanes and hooking on bumpers and wheel wells.

Squishy.

Vulnerable. 

That’s what Sideswipe’s cortex screamed as he watched. So _vulnerable_ with only pathetic excuses for armor, little better than the porous cloth it wore.

The lack of armor bothered Sideswipe down to his core. 

Those other cars driven by humans could halt their momentum in an instant. Fallible, mostly blind without the complicated array of sensors and processing power Sideswipe had, and _pop_ Sideswipe’s human in a spray of wet chunky ooze.

_Like the rabbit._

Chasing frantically after him, wedging himself into every spare available space in traffic, boot slamming loosely around in his interior, Sideswipe’s spark rate increased the more he tracked his wheeled human. 

Plastic flimsy, pathetic excuse for amour on a wrist, purposefully slammed against the door of a car that almost merged on top of his human. 

Then a grin stretched on that fleshie face.

Spark wrenching agony shot through Sideswipe's systems as his human jumped down steps into a zone where Sideswipe was not permitted to _legally_ follow.

Tracking him on separate scanners as he dropped out of visual range, Sideswipe roared through traffic, skidding around corners in a jealous fury as his spark demanded _he_ should be the one his human hooked onto. No longer a shred of doubt in a single circuit that human belonged to Sideswipe. 

Belonged _with_ Sideswipe.

They could dodge through traffic together. 

Because Sideswipe’s human loved to dance at the edge of the Well too. 

On wheeled pedes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every single migraine symptom in this story is something I myself have experienced, though when I experience temporary spacial-numberical synesthesia I only experience 3 dimensions instead of 17 XD, and I certainly _never_ feel good the next day.
> 
> How [Sol commutes to work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrxjgqsLMM), more or less. Sideswipe is rightly freaking out about his human going splat at the same time now he's getting intensely excited about playing with his wheeled peded human.
> 
> And Sol certainly notices the same shiny silver Corvette following him next chapter.


	5. Edge of the Well

Sol scowled as he couldn’t find his steel-toed boot. 

That drunk ass fucker from last night must have taken it. It’d be a week before he could afford new ones thanks to his stupid idea of trying to sit in on astronomy lectures at Princeton.

One hundred and fifty dollars for a text book, written by that creepy ass professor.

"C’mon nut job. You want a jump start or not?" 

Sol stood, swallowing the gut churning regret, gave one final scan of the parking lot, and strapped on his helmet. Spinning on his roller blades, he pushed forward as José’s car sped, challenging him. Pumping the muscles in his legs to catch up, and he hooked onto the left back wheel well and lowered his center of gravity into a crouch as José got him up to speed.

Familiar vibrations of rolling over pavement shot up through his feet. For three blocks he crouched until he saw ruby red break lights in the distance.

Too easy.

Not enough.

Knowing José had to go straight when Sol needed to go right, Sol detached the hooked bar he had shaped at work, tucked his left arm behind his back with the hook, and crossed, foot over foot, as he merged in front of two lanes of traffic to the right lane, coasting into his turn.

Darting among moving vehicles, skating between cars on the one way street, Sol split down the center of the lanes between them; leaving the honking breaking commuter traffic in his wake.

Blood pumping as he pushed himself faster, spinning to the side to avoid a car moving over into his lane, as he slammed his wrist guard against the side of the car and smirked to himself as he hooked a wheel well and crouched to draft on a black Civic, until he once again, spotted red break lights in the distance.

A running map of the city in his head, he detached and crossed in front of cars to his left, hopped a curb and leapt over the set of stairs descending into a park to avoid the red stop light up ahead. Cutting through the park, pedestrians cursed and swore as he shot past them, but Sol couldn’t bring himself to care. 

Muscles screaming under the strain, he pushed himself harder, stretching his senses and awareness of moving objects he could both see and hear relative to his current position to the limit.

Noise and clamor, scents and sights washed away to the breeze and movement relevant only to the here and now.

Adrenaline shooting through his veins, heart pounding, muscles fiber tearing; the ember of an intoxicating semblance of peace sparked in the rush. 

Jumping up, he turned, crouched and glided backwards along the edge of a fountain, balancing on the tips of his toe-wheels as wind drifted prismatic drops of spray like a curtain of starlight.

Dank numbness burned away for a single pulse.

A sideways flip over the head of a teenager on his phone; pigeons sent flying upon landing. Iridescent feathers catching the morning light, tiny stars shooting amid the wind from their wings stirring the air in swirling vortexes past his face.

Startled coos, curses, and indignant shouts filtered out of hearing; no longer the now.

A single pulse.

Burning away the intangible emptiness with pure, raw energy of movement was all that remained.

Always just out of reach.

Racing up steps three at a time, he twisted through the drab colors of success commuting obediently along a sidewalk. The scent of coffee mingled with aftershave and hairspray, reeking only of soulless desperation.

Leaping up to his right, he fled from among them, sliding sideways across a concrete construction barrier -

Only to launch off to lose himself back in the multicolored ebb and flow of traffic.

Skirting the edge of where he belonged.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Two pulses.

Two individual pulses in his spark.

His human had activated!

And Sideswipe had been _very legally_ , stuck two blocks away at a red light with his front bumper inches behind a squatty drone labeled a _Smart Car_. How smart could a human drone car be? 

Not smart enough to get out of his way, when he revved his engine and honked his horn to accelerate through as the light had turned yellow. His human's boot had slammed forward in his footwell as he braked. Cables extended to place it on his passenger seat, and he belted it safely into place so it would stop flying around in his interior.

Each pulse left a deeper welling ache in his spark than the one before. Each fraction of a second without it, an eternity of fear that it could never be reached.

That he could never catch up.

That his human would go splat.

As soon as the light was green he roared forward, driving the tiny drone before him through the intersection and forcing it faster for two blocks before he saw an opening beside him to the right and slid seamlessly in to the gap. 

The Smart Car, finally free of his bumper, jerked to the side as Sideswipe surpassed it.

His human popped back up into his visual range, a block ahead, back out from the area Sideswipe was not suppose to drive - even though he could definitely make it down and up those steps no problem.

 _Rules_ were really starting to frag him off. 

Spark throbbing with his human’s heart beat he had pounding through his internal speakers, Sideswipe watched his human twist and dart among his own kind as he raced to catch up, always legally indicating his intent, weaving across all three lanes of traffic and back.

Drone cars, honked and jerked away from him but he shoved it all to his peripheral sensor net.

All primary sensors were locked on his human with a single focused intensity Sideswipe had never managed before outside of battle.

A further block and his human jumped up on a barrier, his wheels shooting out bright sparks as he balanced until he launched from the barrier among his own kind, back into traffic where he belonged.

Beside Sideswipe.

A whine shot through his engine, as his human darted directly in front of him, splitting the lane to his right then crossing over to his left three cars ahead, hooking on and drafting on a car that _wasn’t Sideswipe_!

And Sideswipe was trapped. 

Helplessly surrounded by a net of rules and regulations while his human threw them all away.

And left him behind.

His spark throbbed, raw.

Clenching his plating tight for each available inch, Sideswipe searched the radio waves and found a song whose bass beat thrummed through his frame along time with the heart rate of his human.

Bumblebee use music to entice and entertain his human pet Sam right?

Engine roaring, beat vibrating through his speakers, Sideswipe pulled out to his left and split down the lane after him. Human drone cars swerved out of their lanes as he ghosted millimeters from their frames.

Frag rules.

If his human wanted to dance at the edge of the Well, he was going to do it where Sideswipe could protect him.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

The revving roar of a high performance engine combined with the thrumming bass behind him shot through his body, timing his heart rate with the beat.

A smirk tugged up the corners of Sol’s mouth.

Finally.

Detaching from the Ford Explorer he had been drafting, he crossed over to the center lane. Shooting between a gap he could almost feel the driver ghosting him. 

With the running map of the city in his head, Sol weaved through traffic, constantly cutting off the car behind him from passing him. 

How Sol commuted to work when there was no snow was dangerous.

Taunting racers in sports cars was suicidal with the risk of collateral damage if the driver was someone with more money and bravado than skill.

His ribs gave a phantom ache along with his left leg, as if to remind him not to do it.

The index finger on his left hand could still be popped out at an angle if he forced it.

Even knowing how close he'd come to death, he couldn’t help it. 

Flying high under the endorphins shooting through his veins, he never backed down.

Sol loved a challenge. 

Darting to his right, without bothering to look behind to see his challenger, he took off through a parking garage. Hopping over the exit barrier, his challenger bottomed out through the entrance a few paces behind him, both of them accelerating down the ramp.

A car heading up the exit ramp, caused Sol to jump up and skid across the median before descending back down. 

A flash of silver entered his awareness, the overhead lights glinting streaks across custom chrome, but Sol focused on the now, leaning into a turn to his left, dragging his hooked pole across the concrete for additional stability.

That engine roared, tires squealing under the force of drifting behind him, as the driver took tight turns Sol could easily maneuver. 

Racing higher and higher through the parking garage, Sol swore he could actually _feel_ where the car was behind him without looking. Reaching the top he slid to the side and his opponent came launching out behind him.

Letting the driver take the lead, he hooked onto the back wheel well.

And for a moment, he almost face planted as he stumbled. 

It was the same god damn silver mirrored Corvette fucker who stole his steel-toed boot.

Any rage shooting momentarily through his veins, was lost in a fraction of a second it took him to make the realization.

Because as soon as he grasped on to the impeccably polished chromed silver wheel well with his right hand, dank numbness lifted in more than a single pulse, and he couldn’t stop laughing as the insane driver sped up and drifted with squealing tires back down the spiral exit ramp of the parking garage, with Sol crouched riding down beside him.

Dimensions of his surroundings blurred as time beat no longer in a straight line but with his heart through vibrations shooting through warm chrome straight up his arm.

To his very being.

Reality for him became… _endless_. 

Over head lights mingled with morning sunlight, creating streaks of bright light across mirrored surfaces.

And Sol became engulfed in the vortices of wind rushing over every contour, connecting through his screaming muscles, straight down to the vibrations connecting him to concrete. 

He felt - 

Slamming through the parking barricade, brought Sol back to reality as he smacked a fragment of the barricade sailing toward his face away with his left hand. Angling himself as tires squealed out back into the flow of traffic, sparks shot out from the strikers embedded in his wheels. 

Sol grinned as he shifted his body to match seamlessly with the driver’s indicated lane changes as they cut through traffic together. 

For five seemingly endless blocks they worked in unison, through the traffic, leaving honking protests of the past in their wake.

Halfway through an intersection with a green light, Sol detached with a lingering drift of his finger tips across custom chrome from wheel well down to bumper, vibrations of the bass and running engine shooting up his arm.

And he turned left, tossing a sloppy two finger salute with a parting nod in thanks to a fellow skilled adrenaline junkie, and crossed into a park to continue on to work as the driver in the car revved hard and honked in return, continuing straight.

Finger tips tingling, a smile stretched his face as he continued toward the industrial park, leaping over benches and savoring the new captured feeling of mirrored starlight racing through his veins and memory.

As he slid into the garage, Janine narrowed dark eyes at him from the doorway to her office.

“What did I tell you about blading into the garage?”

“Not to.” Sol responded toward her, but he couldn’t manage to feel concerned for breaking one of her safety rules.

“One of these days Sol, you are going to light this place up with those stupid ass strikers in those wheels. You’re damn lucky I took out insurance. You’re on the new lambo today, fuckers with no brains ruined that beauty and the engine caught fire.” 

He nodded at her, then turned to open his locker, “Tuan working today?” He asked convserationally, heart still racing.

“No.” Startling at her voice appearing suddenly beside him, Sol looked down. Janine was a short woman, but even though he towered over her, she never seemed small in his mind. 

Especially as she leaned forward and peered at him now, dark brown eyes searching his face.

“What?” He asked defensively. “I forgot. I’ve never bladed in before. I won’t do it again.”

Skeptically, she looked him up and down, “You get laid or something?” 

Staring down at his boss as lingering echoes of pulses shot through his veins, Sol shrugged.

"Or something."

“Pft.” Janine scoffed then turned back to her office and tossed parting instructions over her shoulder, “Salvage the suspension and break components, I want the transmission hollowed out, door panels lined up, and get that windshield out in one piece!” 

Taking off his helmet, Sol ran still tingling finger tips through his sweat soaked hair as he turned back toward his locker.

Placing his reflective golden skater helmet on the shelf, he paused, swearing his eerie blue eyes flashed briefly in his reflection and a smile still stretched his face.

Shaking his head he mimicked Janine’s own scoff toward himself.

Fuck dammit, but he needed to meet the driver of that custom concept Corvette.

He’d never drafted anyone so skilled before, and that mirrored surface…

Throughout the day he swore he kept hearing the odd echo of that engine under high pitched grinding sparks of saws, and hissing flames of welding equipment.

He chalked it up to his fantasy he kept rolling over in his mind: at night, city lights reflecting on that surface as they sped through more empty roads, would streak like the lights of burning suns across the sky.

Burning away the intangible emptiness with pure, raw energy of movement.

And actually reaching it.

For longer than a single pulse, he could become endless.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Sideswipe squawked and revved his engine in frustrated fury as his properly activated human detached and took off to the left while Sideswipe was forced to continue to go straight through the intersection, trapping him on an onramp he couldn't escape without _really_ fragging Optimus off and breaking his rules by transforming in public.

When he found his human again, Sideswipe slammed on his brakes, retreated in reverse to hide himself behind some bushes across the street, clamped his plating tight to his frame -

And gaped. 

Deactivated human drone cars with multitude of burn marks, sat wedged and stacked behind fences. Older frames rusted, as vegetation grew through them, the frames picked clean. 

Inside the building through an open door, there stood his human, surrounded by the parts looking so much like Sideswipe's own.

His human then proceeded to climbed underneath, then into and _through_ a brilliant red deactivated human drone car -

Tearing it apart with a grin on his face.

A shudder ran through Sideswipe’s frame, his plans to obtain cellophane to contain organic fluid leaking of his human forgotten, as a more disturbing visual took its place.

Sideswipe’s human didn’t just dance at the edge of the Well. 

He fragging played in the slag pits themselves.

Watching as burnt frayed wires were carelessly tossed out from inside the vehicle, another shudder wracked Sideswipe's frame. How was he going to contain a terrifying pet human like _that_ inside him?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sol works at a chop shop to harvest salvageable parts of exotic cars. Sideswipe is simultaneously horrified and ecstatic.
> 
> His human is the best human.
> 
> [Sparking roller blade wheels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWCEHFwkHdg) are really a thing. And I mean, c'mon, this is Sunstreaker in human form. He's flashy ;)


	6. Common Denominator

If the smelting pits of Kaon had a literal form on Earth, that’s where Sideswipe’s human chose to spend his day.

The further Sideswipe cast his scanners into the building, the more he clenched tighter on his frame. There were shelves upon shelves of parts, setting him on edge in a way he couldn’t explain. Not exactly identical, but similar enough to his own systems and the components he had sliced and torn out of opponents in the past, lined up and _sorted_ for… for what he wasn’t certain.

Because that was no Medbay, his human didn’t repair _anything_. 

Only sowed more and more destruction, hard plastic covering his wet, gelatinous optics, and with a grin.

Excitement warred with trepidation through his systems as his spark struggled to simultaneously coil tight and burst out of its casing. 

Multiple times throughout the day Sideswipe went to go to him. Hover nearby him, hoping to feel that warm, contentment flare in his spark again. Entice him to latch on so they could dance on the edge of the Well together…

He was so close!

Sideswipe’s pet human was tauntingly right _there_ across the street.

He could drive over, transform, scoop him up, and drive away before the other human’s slow processing times could translate what had happened.

Instead he became locked on his wheels, calculating and counting every gap, every vulnerable seam in his interior. Shuddering in sympathy with every system he saw his human remove before him from that vibrant, red, and once sleek, human drone car. As the sun stretched higher in the sky, Sideswipe swore he could _feel_ fleshy, greasy, fingers inside his cab, ripping, tearing, and sawing. 

Wrenches and sockets torquing, wires snapping and pried with pliers -

When his human put down his tools, donned an extra layer of cloth, and moved toward a picked clean frame out to the side, Sideswipe made it half out from behind the bush, ready to pounce; only to freeze on his struts. Retreating back under his feeble organic leafy shield, another tool was pulled forth, and a mask flipped down over his human’s head; his grinning face, blocked from view. 

Locked on his visual scanners, Sideswipe used secondary scanners to examine the equipment as his spark tugged in its casing. That weapon was capable of igniting a mixture of pure oxygen and acetylene to 3753.15 Kelvin -

The very gas his human needed to maintain his cellular function turned into flaming, molten doom.

Sparks flew, metal heated and warped under Sideswipe’s pet human’s covered guiding hands.

Sideswipe’s external armor could easily sustain the minimum 1922.15 Kelvin required for entry into the Earth’s atmosphere with little trouble.

But 3753.15…that was just almost _double_ that limit. Sideswipe had been by _stars_ colder than that flaming spark his human controlled. That equipment was capable of generating sixty percent of the surface temperature of this solar system’s star. Yet his vulnerable, fearsome human didn’t flinch or hesitate to wield the power of that heat in his hands.

No.

He had been _smiling_.

Shifting uncomfortably on his locked wheels, Sideswipe’s spark was flooded with conflicting uncertainty and yearning.

And Sideswipe had thought Ratchet’s human was scary. 

Though that was more the threat of Ratchet bearing down on him, than the glare she had sent his way when he flicked a spare wire at her to calculate the reflexes of her species. 

But Sideswipe’s human looked like he tore internal components and twisted metal for _fun_.

Internally Sideswipe grinned, he couldn’t _wait_ to tame him and show him off.

Because Sideswipe wasn’t scared. That’s not why he was still hiding behind the bush out of view.

Not scared at all.

Sideswipe just…

…didn’t want to be cut to bits from the inside, was that too much to ask?

Okay Sideswipe was kind of scared of his feral human cutting him to bits from the inside out, but more-so he was scared of Optimus’ look of disappointment and pity.

“I trusted you Sideswipe,” Sideswipe mimicked his best Optimus Prime impression to himself out of his internal speakers, “you swore that you were ready for this level of responsibly.”

Venting out a put upon sigh, he continued, “Sideswipe, please tell me you did not go against the _one_ major rule I stressed to you beyond not harming the natives, and put our existence here in jeopardy.”

“So help me Sideswipe, if I didn’t put you back together so much I’d swear you don’t have two circuits to rub together in that helm of yours…” Oops that was Ratchet.

Mimicking is inevitable doom if he couldn’t compile a solution, didn’t make his spark ache any less.

If only he could get around the pesky section on ‘only humans with proper clearance’ being allowed to view him transform in the _Welcome to Earth_ data packet. How to get his human proper clearance wasn’t in the manual either. He couldn’t get him clearance without talking to him and he couldn’t talk to him with out clearance! 

Gah! Now his thought processes were just getting trapped in a logic loop.

Keeping his visual scanners on his human, he simultaneously spent the day searching for a solution by scanning through the human pet forums on Earth’s datanet. Learning everything from collars and leashes, ID tags, microchipping, and filing away neutering as potential solution for reducing the urge for his pet human to wander from him. Apparently it also reduced “marking” behaviour, and once he cross referenced that definition, neutering scaled higher on his list of priorities. He had definitely observed humans that could be defined as male leaking on the sides of buildings and “marking them” at Sam’s school.

Humans were the fragging strangest organics Sideswipe had ever encountered.

Okay fine, he hadn’t encountered many organics before Earth. Most planets had been stripped clean of resources before he arrived. Any living organics remaining, he hardly cared to interact with.

But this planet had seven billion of the squishy, oozy species. Certainly no one would miss just _one_ that was of more use to Sideswipe properly activated, than any other fleshie things his human planned on doing.

Because that was Sideswipe's pet human...his pet human just didn't know it yet.

With the sun well past its zenith, he learned about the conflicting pros and cons of shock collars, prong collars, and clicker training respectively in order to reduce aggression but -

Sideswipe focused back on his human, welding on additions and adding shape to the empty frame at the side, and his fuel tank clenched with unspoken agreement.

No.

Absolutely not.

He didn’t _want_ to reduce aggression. He liked his fearsome human pet how he was, but Sideswipe just…

Huffing out his vents, he suppressed the quiver through his lines and he returned the majority of his focus to his research. After another fifteen minutes, his lines started to boil in frustration along with his aching spark. 

There was so much conflicting information on the human datanet about pet ownership. Somehow even surly, ‘shoot-some-sense-into-Sideswipe-and-yank-him-out-of-the-line -of-fire’ Ironhide had gotten an entire pack of pet humans. The thought twisted sour in his tank. By now the Autobots would have realized he was AWOL, and no matter how much he itched to call Ratchet for advice, he was on his own. 

Optimus would never approve a pet human for Sideswipe, especially after what Sideswipe learned when he cross-referenced all the information he had compiled for a common denominator.

The common denominator to human pet ownership, with all the majority of the conflicting information removed, was…was… 

Simmering at the analysis, Sideswipe’s thought processes went internal.

Glaring at his results he ran them ten more times, hoping in vain to see the word _dominance_ scale up the list. 

Dominance. He could do dominance.

But even ‘cheating’ on some of his equations, dominance remained stubbornly not at the top.

Rumbling his engine irritably didn’t change the results.

Armor beginning to twitch again, he resisted transforming in order to fidget back and forth on his wheeled pedes. He ached to stab something, fight someone.

Fraggit all, this was worst than slagging 'patience' as a solution.

Why did the common denominator for pet human ownership have to be slag sucking, diode munching _trust_?

Trust!

No one ever trusted Sideswipe. The other Autobots barely tolerated him.

Blowing air out his vents, and not for the first time since his activation, he tried to reach out through his defective spark and scream at it. Curse at it. Rage at it.

Sinking dejectedly on his struts behind his bush, Sideswipe glowered internally toward his spark still stubbornly aching despite his best efforts of scaring it to do _something_ else.

Replaying the prolonged feeling of his human’s activation this morning thought his cortex…he could barely grasp it in his spark, the ache was overwhelming. 

He needed to move again, to burn it out but -

He _had to_ do this right, he had to prove to the Autobots - to Optimus - that Sideswipe could be trusted with this particular human pet.

He had to put them in a position where they just couldn't say no.

And the more he seethed and glared at his results, the more he realized he had a lot to offer his chosen pet to gain trust.

Biological leaking and lack of proper armor was something Sideswipe was prepared to work with after this morning when his human properly activated. He could offer him a warm place to sleep, shelter from the elements, human organic fuel seemed to be everywhere, and taking him for walks - or rolls rather - was something his human already enjoyed. 

Dihydrogen monoxide was everywhere on this planet, that wasn’t a problem. He could figure out how to groom him, and probably bring himself to at least poke him in a semblance of a petting motion. 

…He just needed to get his fearsome human away from his tools. Without them, surely there was minimal damage he could do to Sideswipe’s interior.

Reassuring himself that it couldn’t possibly be that hard to gain the trust of his human with all he had to offer, he returned more of his attention to his visual scanners.

He could do this, because Sideswipe’s human was…

Sideswipe’s human was…

_SIDESWIPE’S HUMAN WAS GONE!_

Turning over his engine and casting his sensor net as far as he could go, he squawked, spark flaring, engine shrieking out a roar, as a fleshy hand smacked across the back bumper of his aft. 

“Okay this is getting weird,” His scary human rolled up right beside him, shrugging on his cloth subspace, “But I’m not complaining if you want to go again.”

Sideswipe clamped his doors tight under his human’s sudden proximity. 

How did he…

How could Sideswipe’s fierce human make it through his sensor net undetected as a threat? Could all pet humans do that?

Three raps of hard internal skeletal knuckles knocked on his drivers side window, leaving a thin film of fleshy ooze behind, “You live in my building right? Well? You just revving that engine for show or what?”

With a smirking grin stretching his face, his very squish-able and formidable human pushed off and wheeled into the street.

With a squeal of his tires and an accepting rev of his engine, Sideswipe spun backward in a celebratory circle before he peeled out of the parking lot to join him.

Zooming past his human he cut out in front of him, blasted a random song that matched his human’s racing heart and wiggled back and forth to entice him to hook on.

As soon as his human connected, Sideswipe’s spark soared.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Spinning in a tight u-turn in the middle of the street, Sideswipe slid in to park between two cars on the street outside of his human’s dwelling. Rocking back and forth on his shocks under the abrupt halt to his inertia, his human launched up and slid across his aft, tucking and rolling to land in a heap on the ground.

His human spread out on his back, arms and legs in all directions, and lay where he landed. Metal hook released from his grasp, a huge smile stretched his face toward the sky as his body vibrated with laughter. His excited heart rate pounded through Sideswipe’s internal speakers, and Sideswipe preened under the continuous contented humming in his spark. 

Dodging through traffic, simultaneously competing and working in harmony with his human, was exhilarating in a way battle had never been.

“You might be a crazier fuck than me.” Arms reached out and stretched toward the sky, then flopped back down to the ground. 

His pet human tilted his flimsy golden armored head backwards to look at him, and Sideswipe focused on being a perfectly normal autonomous being from another planet in disguise, as his exhaust system ticked and cooled from the after-charge of the rush of energy still shooting through his circuits. 

Flanges, heat shields and other connecting points along his frame settled, heat differentials of materials contracting while cooling, as his spark twirled and basked in contentment. 

His human, rolled over then pushed himself to his wheels. 

Stretching his arms up over his head, cartilage joints and connective tissue cracked and popped as he groaned, “Holy fuck, that felt good.”

Sideswipe barely had time to process that he hadn’t even considered recoiling at that fleshy hand reaching out and knocking on the passenger window.

Emboldened with his success at earning trust, Sideswipe rolled it down a fraction, eager to interact more with his properly activated human.

His human stretched his arm across his body and tilted his neck to the side, moist organics optics glowing with charged excitement under the force of his grin. 

“The way you dodged through traffic to meet up with me exactly as I left the short cut through the park…” He unbuckled his helm armor, tucked it under his arm, and ran a hand through his damp hair, “I swear I could just sense where you were going to be a block away.”

Sideswipe felt the same. 

There had been some guiding _tug_ in his spark when his human dropped off his visual sensors, and it was so strong that he had stopped casting his sensor net toward his human at all. 

Trust.

Sideswipe had never felt trust before.

It was exhilarating. 

Scanning his human again for good measure, he enacted his plan now that he had gained the trust of his human pet. 

Diverting power to his internal projection relays, he activated his hologram in his front seat, then he rolled down the passenger window. His hologram had zero mass, but by the time his human learned that, he would already be safe in his warm new home in Sideswipe’s front seat.

His human leaned against the door and blinked once, furrowed his forehead then shook his head as he chuckled. “You strapped my boot in as a passenger?”

Thrilled with his solution around that pesky ‘clearance,’ he enticed his human further into his cab, by matching the grin on his human’s face and luminosity of his optics with his one made of densely packed photons generated by his nanophotonic circuits.

“Yea, it was flopping around all over the place in here. I had to restrain it.” Sideswipe turned his hologram’s head toward his human.

And his human recoiled, hands shaking.

“What the ever living fuck…you aren’t…you aren’t real...” The quiet mutter of his human echoed through his audial sensors, at the same time the contented humming in Sideswipe’s spark screeched to a halt. Frantic wet optics searched the area, as his human’s heart rate rapidly increased, “Then how did I -“ 

He rolled backwards, before he darted and stumbled frantically on wheels pedes to his dwelling door.

Panicking with the loss of contentment in his spark, Sideswipe followed. Half transforming quickly to spin in place without causing damage to the cars he had slid between, he rushed over the curb, up the path, trying in vain to reactivate his human’s trust. 

“I’m real. See." He called out his speakers from his rolled down windows, "I have a mouth and _hair_. Just like you. And I have your boot, if you want to come in and get it.”

“It’s not happening, it’s not happening, it’s not happening.” His human fumbled with his keys, and Sideswipe tried to nudge him with his bumper, get his human to hook on to his frame again. 

They had been having so much fun. 

But before he could touch him, his human unlocked the door and bolted into the building with one final wide frantic look toward Sideswipe over his shoulder. 

And Sideswipe sunk down on his wheels as each rotation of his spark ached raw against its casing. 

Sure he didn’t have a lot of practice using his hologram, he’d never actually interacted with organics before, had never cared to. 

Checking his reference scans again, Sideswipe simmered. He didn’t know what he had done wrong. 

His hologram was _perfect_.

He’d made it look exactly like the only human he had ever cared to scan long enough to model after.

He’d made it identical to his human -

Down to his fleshy wet optics glowing with excess charge.

Certainly on a planet of seven billion of his species, they couldn't have that many unique frame types.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Twenty minutes later, Sideswipe glowered dejectedly at his readings in the parking space outside his human’s dwelling’s window. Boot still strapped in securely in his passenger seat, his human's metal hook he had left on the ground now rested in the back seat. Scanners showed his human fled directly to his designated leaking room.

There his human had leaked out its intake into the proper leaking receptacle, stripped cloth coverings and detachable wheeled pedes, and sat down in a spray of hot dihydrogen monoxide. 

Humans required a daily intake of dihydrogen monoxide. 

That was in the _Welcome to Earth_ data packet. 

Referencing it again, Sideswipe couldn't find any mention that humans absorbed their fluid requirements through their skin, and his human did not appear to be cleaning himself. 

Body temperature scans stated optimal readings, yet Sideswipe registered his human stay curled into a ball under the spray; his body shaking. 

And his spark ached increased as he considered his leaky human might be defective. 

Extending his sensor net toward every electronic device in his human’s dwelling, Sideswipe attempted to offer his pet human solidarity.

They could be defective together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sideswipe you were so close, your human is fearsome but skittish! Especially when confronted with a creepy mechanical smile that's not _quite_ right, glowing blue eyes, and a photonic copy of himself.
> 
> Smooth Sideswipe. Smooth.


	7. Cosmic Castaway

On his tenth birthday Sol had been found by the police, curled up tight in a ball and crying under the hot jets in the shower. The blood of his parents, that had splashed across and begun to dry on his skin, long pooled down the drain in rusting red rivers. But his clothes had been as permanently stained as his core. 

Thirteen years later, crying curled up in the shower had become a habit. 

The hot cascade upon his skin did nothing to burn through the dank emptiness inside him, but it had always given him an alibi for exiting the washroom in his foster homes with puffy red eyes. The sound of his shower muffled his sobs - even now - when there was no one outside his door to risk hearing them to take advantage of his weakness and mock him.

Eyes clenched shut, fingers twisting through his hair, he fought against the tinny sound of data skittering across his brain, grasping to rationalize it all away.

Misfiring neurons. 

He got migraines. That was a neurological disorder.

He hadn’t heard data. 

Misfiring neurons.

He was breaking the pattern.

He hadn’t heard data.

Skittering electric data, nothing but an echo now. A memory of misfiring neurons in his auditory section of his brain from when he had locked eyes with his hallucination of _himself_ sitting in a car that couldn’t possibly exist. 

An impossible car that _somehow_ had gotten him to his building as the emptiness inside him had been burned away. 

He had felt -

His stomach lurched and Sol swallowed down what threatened to rise in his throat again.

Could feelings be hallucinated along with the visual and auditory centers of his brain backfiring? Did ‘feeling hallucinations’ start in the brain, or the gut, or the heart, or the -

_Souls don’t exist._

He was a biological network of electrical impulses. A cellular network reacting to external and internal stimulus. His heart was a muscle. Serotonin and dopamine were produced in the gut and processed in the brain. Adrenaline was produced by a gland by the kidneys.

Hormones.

A network of organic chemicals that affected behaviour.

A class of biological molecules that could get out of wack to produce feelings of euphoria as he played with the edge of fight or flight and drained his adrenal gland by darting among traffic.

Hormones that left his muscles shaky and his heart racing as if coming down from a high. 

Hormones that backfired, unbalanced, and had caused him to feel a deep welling pain that had set the hair on the back of his neck to rising as he had cleaned up his welding practice assignment Janine had given him for the day. 

A deep welling pain that brought back the emptiness inside him in full, chilling force, compelling him to skate across the road. 

A deep welling pain that burned away when he set sight on that impossible custom chromed Corvette with that impossibly skilled driver parked behind a bush, and _ached_ to touch it.

That face -

His stomach contorted into a knot, and he forced the rising lump back down his throat.

His _own_ cursed face. 

It was like looking through a rift in time at a mirror of his impending future coalescing in front of him no matter what he did.

 _Demon_. _Satan spawn_.

Shaking his head in denial, he bit his fist as he tried to fight back against those chanting voices of the past that would rise in his mind with memories searing and cutting down his back and across his chest. 

Rocking, and shaking under hot spray, tears welling through clenched eyes, he started his internal litany grasping at memories of captured starlight in a mirrored lake to chase them away.

Souls didn’t exist.

The concept of a soul was an extension of self awareness; a construct of identity.

There was no soul that could be sold, or bought, or traded, or tainted.

There was nothing inside him that had been sold, tattered, lost, or castaway. 

Repeating his litany in his mind, he chased after the voice of his father rumbling against his back in the middle of a lake, as the stars had faded from the sky. A fine, clammy mist had risen in the dawn of a new day. Venus, lingered bright with reflected sunlight on the horizon above the trees. The heat of his father’s back against his own had fought to keep back the early morning chill as he pressed against it.

When golden yellow rays pierced across the sky, forcing back the limbo of deep blue twilight standing between night and day, his father spoke.

_“Sol. I named you for the sun. I named you for the stars. So you could burn bright in defiance of the cold, empty vacuum that has encased me every day of my being.”_

Pointedly ignoring the endless rush that had ignited through every muscle, every neuron, every fiber of his being he had thought he had captured today; under the hot spray of the shower, Sol focused on his feeling of captured starlight from the past along with the voice of his father. 

And rebelled and raged against chanting voices looping through his head in order to bring his sobbing under control. 

He was named for the sun. 

He was named for the stars.

Burning bright in defiance of the cold, empty vacuum that encased him.

There was nothing inside him that had been sold, tattered, lost, or castaway.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

“Clear, clear you stupid thing. Clear!” Frantic high pitch monotone beeps matched every frenzied push of the ‘clear’ button at the bottom of his microwave as his mutters rose in volume. A burning panic flooding his veins, Sol tried to stop the symbols from scrolling across the display before his eyes.

The symbols stilled. 

His heart pounded as they didn’t clear. Instead, they stayed frozen. Solidified into a familiar orientation that had never been so ominous. 

Reaching behind the appliance, his hand clenched tight around the power cord and yanked to cut the power as Sol slowly backed away from the counter like the cord had become a snake about to strike. Releasing a breath, his shoulders sagged when the screen went dark and _stayed_ dark. Turning from his small kitchen counter along the wall, cold leftovers abandoned, he set his jaw as he pointedly denied to himself that the flashing symbols of his fritzing microwave had been anything more than crossed wires.

He certainly hadn’t just seen it spell ‘hello.’

And he certainly wasn’t hungry anymore.

Heart still pounding to escape his chest, he forced out a tentative laugh at himself as he scrubbed his hand down his face. 

Stressed. He was stressed, that’s all.

The astronomy lecture, the textbook, the migraine, his boot…strapped in like a -

“Don’t think about it.” He cut the thought off before he allowed it to fully form past the churning in his stomach.

Surveying his small apartment, he grimaced as he tried to recall the feeling of achievement he had gained when his deposit had been accepted despite his lack of credit history. Two thousand dollars in collateral, plus first and last month’s rent. 

In cash, for a ghost who had no past.

The bank had smiled falsely at him when he went to go open an account, said he might as well have just walked straight out of the woods into existence at twenty two. 

It had taken him over two years with the cost of materials to earn that much money, and hold onto it, on the streets. He learned the hard way how hard it was to claw through the barriers and red tape back into society’s ranks after falling through the cracks. 

The mattress on the floor of his single room contained one twisted set of sheets he left on always as he pointedly tried not to think about the stains coating it beneath that thin layer.

It wasn’t a cardboard mat in a subway or under an overpass.

It was a start.

An end table he had picked up on the side of the road sat next to it. The wood was still good, a few surface nicks and dents he had sanded smooth and resurfaced in multicolored ornate swirls, abandoned with the lamp that sat upon it next to his window.

The black out curtain he had purchased. Eager to no longer curl up in a dark alley with a knife, able to block out the blinding sun as pain lanced through his head and he vomited in a corner. His clothes, folded and stacked in pallet-made-shelves, passed as industrial chic, not that anyone but him ever saw them. A power saw, sander and drill he had stolen from a construction site rested against them and he forced a sardonic smirk onto his face.

Hipsters' obsessions with deconstructed wooden pallets swiped from the backs of stores was a gold mine of creative options. He still needed to haul back more, one by one, to complete his bed frame half finished on the floor by the door. 

Despite how far he had come on his own after he had spooked and fled from his last foster home in the dead of night, it was hard not to look at the drab space surrounding him and feel failure reflecting off every surface. 

Blank monotonous off-white walls surrounded him; empty, and gnawing at his core. 

A step ladder to his left stretched up to the ceiling, drop cloths pooling beneath it and along the drab edges of a world begging to be filled with colour.

To add colour would void a portion of his damage deposit, he was already walking a fine line with what he had created on it. All his street art materials sat in boxes, spilling out of his closet. Canvases he never hung to avoid creating a tiny hole in the wall that would syphon off some of his funds in the end, sat stacked and abandoned against each other on the floor once he filled them.

A horn honked outside his window, causing the hairs on the back of his neck to rise and he grimaced.

Fingers twitching once was all it took to break him from his numb apathy. 

Balling his hands in to fists, he stormed over to his make-shift shelf, grabbed his headphones and stuck them in his ears. Plugging them into his phone, he started a playlist that could drown out the world and set his mind on a journey. Stalking to the window, he yanked down his blind with a snarl, casting his room in complete darkness.

And flicked the switch that set his drab ceiling and walls aflame in a simulated cosmos invisible to the human eye.

Fluorescent glowing starscapes of marbled planets, comets and nebulas, shot, twisted and burned around him from all sides under the dim violet glow of his bedside black light. A meteor shower rained down from a central point above his bed, burning down the wall and erupting against the floor as a headboard of chunks of molten earth frozen mid impact. 

Corner and angles he had shaded smooth with every line of negative space to give the illusion of a dome arching around him. Constellations, lost amide the myriad of star points, and condensing into a dense cloud of an arm of the milky way bisecting across his ceiling at a rising diagonal from one corner of his room to the other.

Hot nebulous gases of red, green, purple, blue and yellow billowed, reached, and compressed tight, sparking new stars within under pressure. 

Then building new worlds under the force of their gravitational pull.

The lessons of Sol’s father encircled all around him, and only his feet remained grounded as his mind was freed from its cage. 

_Everything Sol…all matter for life came from the stars._

Walking over to his mural he traced his hand over the death of a star he had painted, bursting violently outward in a supernova. A shockwave of heated colourful gas tearing through planets that had once orbited around it, consuming them and giving birth to new elements and ejecting them across the cosmos to coalesce into new forms of potential life. 

_Compiling and merging in the chaos, heated gases of colourful clouds, drawn together by gravity and formed under pressure in a vacant endless void of nothing until brief moments of order formed and took hold._

Drifting his hand over dark negative space, he imagined the heat radiating off the twisting, otherworldly, tendrils. Hot clouds of illuminated hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and more, all the building blocks necessary for life, glowing similar to a neon light under the force of emitting radiation.

Light.

Emitted by atoms falling back to a lower energy state.

Energy.

_Since the formation of the universe, energy has remained a constant. It can not be created or destroyed, only transformed._

Fingers trailing and hoping through space, the swirling mass of mostly hydrogen condensed into a scorching hot ball of energy. Rocks and gases attracted together around it, iron cores took shape in a circular plane of individual orbits.

A star, and its planets.

 _We are all of us, made of starlight._ His father’s favorite personal slant on Carl Sagan’s infamous quote, spiraled in a mix of calligraphy and Sol’s own personal tag style in the trailing edge of a comet melting into vapor. 

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glint of movement off his helmet where he had tossed it on the floor. The illuminated universe around him warped and glinted on its reflective mirrored gold surface.

A conflicted grimace tugged at the corner of his lips as he examined his painting of a metallic world.

Gold. 

Sol’s father violently ended his own life in a murder suicide before he could learn that gold didn’t form in the birth, or death, of a star. 

Veins of gold pulsed across the metallic curvature of the world forming in the orbit of a binary star system.

Rare throughout the universe, unlike carbon or iron, gold didn’t form with the birth or the death of a star in a supernova.

The element could only be born in a cataclysmic event, like when -

Recoiling his hand from the wall, Sol jumped back, tearing his headphones off as something nudged against his foot. 

Thinking that despite his best efforts, maybe he had attracted a rat into his apartment, he could only stand locked in dawning horror. 

What he saw was worse than a rat.

His helmet moved forward with a low whirr and nudged against his foot again.

“Oh _fuck_ no!” Reaching down he grabbed it, intent on slamming his hallucination against the wall until it shattered. Only to fumble his helmet in his hands as one the only belonging that had made it through Sol’s many moves to different foster homes over the years, that had survived his years on the streets in his bag - 

Spun circles around him across the floor, flashing its lights - 

Under its own power.

His heart clenched as he kicked the remote control lamborgini his mother had given him on his tenth birthday, sending it flying then himself scrambling across the room and leaping onto his mattress.

Heart racing, stomach twisting, he reached over and pulled down on his black out curtain so it snapped and coiled back up. The sun, not yet set, cause his star scape ultra violet light mural to disappear, replaced with drab white walls.

He scanned the floor.

Spinning out, high pitched tiny wheels burned at full force from within his paints. Trapped on its back, its front wheels twisted back and forth in the air like a pathetic demonic turtle. 

Crouching back into the corner of his bed, he slowly set his helmet beside him, reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellphone as he twisted his other hand in his hair.

Tears welling behind his eyes he brought up his contact list, and hovered his thumb over the number the told himself he should have forced himself to forget six years ago.

If it still worked at all. 

Pressing his thumb down to select the number, he swallowed a lump in his throat as he brought his phone to his ear. 

It rang once.

Twice. 

Sol kept his eyes locked on that toy car trying to right itself.

Three -

“Hello?” The familiar background cheers echoing in the rink tore at his heart and he couldn’t find his voice. They had probably forgotten him. Moved on. 

“Helllll-ooooo? Listen fucker I can hear you breathing.”

Biting in his lips, he couldn’t control his tears from forming, as her voice helped him find his foundation. “…Winnie? It’s…it’s Sol.”

A pause, and Sol hated how much he had just sounded like a lost child as his voice cracked.

“Holy shit, _Sol_? Where the - you know what, it doesn’t matter, where are you? We’ll come to you.” Clenching his hand tighter around his phone, he wrapped his other hand around his left ear to block out the noise of spinning wheels, focusing as much as he could on grasping only to the comforting sound of her roller skates across the rink floor. “Maya! _MAYA_! It’s Sol!”

There was an excited shriek that made the corner of his lips tilt up, shuffling and a clatter, then their voices were farther away, “Shit Sol! Hold on, we dropped it.”

The jagged air that left his lungs was either a laugh or sob, he didn’t know. “There, you still there Sol?” A lighter voice filled his ear.

“Yea, Maya. I’m still here.”

“You’ve been impossible to track down you know that?”

“I fell off the grid.”

“No judgement Sol, you -”

Tinny data skittered across his brain and he winced as if nails were dragged down the back of his neck.

The red Lamborghini RC car went still.

The background noise of the derby rink was gone, and his own pounding heart was all he heard through the speaker.

“Maya? Winnie? Can you still hear me?” His prompt, only met with silence.

A heartbeat. A muscle, pumping blood through his body.

Two.

“…Sol?” In an instant his veins turned to ice along with that voice. “Is that your destination? Or your frame type? Like the sole of a boot? Or…like the…immaterial core… of…”

The voice of his demonic hallucination trailed off and went silent.

Crawling off his bed, he gave a quick glance to his RC car trapped on its back, completely still, and inched his way to under his window. Left hand gripped the ledge, he pulled himself up to peer down out of his building.

Three stories down, the silver corvette was parked in Sol’s parking space he never used. As soon as his eyes locked on it, its headlights flashed and its horn beeped. 

“Leave me alone.” He whispered to himself, as his hand trembled around his phone. 

“I _can’t_. Out of seven billion other souls on this planet, I choose you Pikachu.” He swore the car rocked and wiggled on its wheels like an excited puppy. 

Blinking, and shaking his head, Sol hissed, “Oh _hell_ no.”

It stilled.

The voice over his phone dropped to a growl as the engine of the car parked three stories down revved. “I’m getting _really_ irritated waiting down here, grab your wheels and get your fleshie aft down here or I’m coming up."

“Don’t you fucking dare.” 

“You don’t think I can? You think I’m too _short_?” All playfulness was gone from the tone in the voice. With an explosion of shifting metal faster than Sol could process, a giant chromed robot crouched in place where once there had been a mirrored Corvette. “I can make that jump. _Trust me_.”

A deadly smile stretched across its face.

Staring down into its sparking blue eyes forged in the fires of hell, Sol’s knuckles strained as he gripped tight on his window sill. 

And matched its deadly expression with one of his own.

Hanging up his phone, he hesitated only for a moment in his step as he considered calling Winnie back. Shaking his head, he shoved his pay as you go phone in his pocket. This was for the best. This was exactly why he left their home the night they asked if he would like to be adopted by them. 

No attachments.

Grabbing his father’s leather jacket, he shrugged it on like armor, and pulled the hood of his hoodie up out the back of his collar. Zipping his jacket all the way to his neck, encasing himself in it completely, he snatched up his backpack.

Pouring out the contents of his backpack on the floor, he stuffed it full of a few stencils, putty knives, and cans of spray paint. Hand suspending over his remote control car a fraction, the memory of it helplessly spinning its wheels and getting no where twisted something inside him. He grabbed it and placed it back up on the shelf he must have knocked as he imagined it trying to chase him. Pushing down the guilt that rose to see its spoiler cracked after thirteen years of being so careful with it -

He turned away.

Tying on his roller blades, he broke his own rule about never wearing them in his apartment and marking up his floor, he darted toward his freezer to take some cash from his coffee can.

It couldn’t be helped. 

He need to go. He needed to _move_. He needed a burn in his muscles, and to free his mind by blending colours on a wall like Winnie had taught him -

Before he exploded and punched someone.

A single push on his wheels had him next to his bed, picking up his helmet, and spinning to stare out the window at the Corvette sitting _innocently_ in the parking lot. Maybe the Corvette _was_ real, but that driver and that robot definitely couldn’t be real. He looked down at it as he placed his helmet on his head. 

The headlights flashed in time with the click of the buckle under his chin.

And he glared straight at Satan’s Corvette in challenge as he slipped his tooth guard in his mouth, pulling back his lips to show the red painted pointed teeth then set his jaw and began his internal litany. 

He was named for the sun. 

He was named for the stars.

Burning bright in defiance of the cold, empty vacuum that encased him.

Cast and molded in the cosmos - 

He was starlight forged into flesh.

And he was going to _burn_ that fucking hallucination out of every cell of his body. 

Locking his wrist guard in place, he clenched his hand into a tight fist to control the fine trembling that raced with his pounding heart. 

Just a muscle. Nothing more.

There was nothing inside him that had been sold, tattered, lost, or castaway. 

Eerily blue eyes stared down hard at that Corvette; set with an iron core. 

Souls didn’t exist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sideswipe...uh...did some Pokemon research for when it comes to capturing your earth battle pets...
> 
> And now...the life that Sol has lived, his plans, his history, his skills, are about to change drastically. Have fun earning some trust with him Sideswipe.
> 
> If you have never seen [Black light murals](https://youtu.be/7S38f3J4Iwg?t=55s) I highly recommend checking them out.
> 
> Inspiration for the chapter title [Cosmic Castaway - Electrasy](https://youtu.be/y7K_AhMyd-4)


	8. Convergent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should have broken this up so I could have more consistent updates for you but instead have a monster chapter.

“A BOAT? ARE YOU PURPOSEFULLY GRINDING MY GEARS? YOU HAVE A SLAG SUCKING BOAT?”

Sideswipe’s human turned toward him from the upper deck at the infuriated rev of his engine and smirked - fragging smirked - at Sideswipe hopelessly trapped behind a barricade. He had chased his human through city streets, cutting him off out of alleyways and having a fragging spark attack because his human’s metal hook was in his back seat. His human was using his fleshy hands, wiggly fingers grasping perilously close to spinning wheels as he latched onto wheel wells that simply WERE NOT SIDESWIPE.

But with Sideswipe’s scanners compulsively locked on his human, his aching spark sank. This time, Sideswipe simply could not follow. Even if he could transform among all the humans around him, he wasn’t certain he could maintain his balance on his wheels on a slag sucking _boat_.

It would be like that time on the Primus forsaken planet of mostly sand when the ground shook beneath him in waves. Unlike other Autobots, if Sideswipe tried to walk across under the liquified dihydrogen monoxide - sodium chloride solution, his wheeled pedes would just sink down into the gunk and organic bits he scanned beneath the surface. 

Revving his engine to burn out the ache in his spark, Sideswipe fumed. If he wasn’t so infuriated, he’d be impressed.

His human Soul was fierce, devious, and quicker than any fleshie had any right to be on wheels. 

Yet as the boat left shore toward towers looming on an island in the distance, all Sideswipe could feel was deepening dread welling in his spark. ‘If statements’ spiraled in his cortex, all leading to the statistical end of his destined pet in slow motion, graphic predictions as Sideswipe consumed and processed video file after video file from the human datanet at a rapid fire pace. 

The videos and searches didn’t help calm the anxious twinge in his lines. Documentary footage detailed a fishing boat getting eaten because it wasn’t big enough, and of sharks swarming in tornados like hungry Insecticons.

What if his human got eaten by a shark?

What if his human soul got sucked out to sea?

What if his human’s boat sank?

What if a whale jumped out of the water and landed on his boat?

What if Cthulhu rose from the depths and Godzilla was in Tokyo?

Simultaneously, Sideswipe scanned the signs around him for some solution, some loophole he could take advantage of so he didn’t directly disobey Optimus and lose his pet privileges before he had even earned them. 

_’Paulus Hook Ferry.’_

A quick calculation of routes to the landing point of that boat, cross referenced with current traffic patterns sent Sideswipe’s engine roaring and his wheels burning, skidding out underneath him.

In current traffic, following the human rules and being a perfectly acceptable drone car, his human would beat him by an intolerable fourteen minutes.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Crisp, whipping wind filled his ears, vibrations under his wheels, and the pedestrian ferry pulled away from the dock.

Challenging glare and smirk in place, Sol almost sagged against the upper railing when his revving and honking demonic hallucination stayed put on the shoreline. Screaming and trembling quad muscles from his dash through traffic with his hallucination ghosting his every step, he took a deep breath and swallowed the lump in his throat. His heart still pounded as he watched Satan’s Mirrored Corvette peal out on squealing tires, and head north up the shoreline. 

Having darted to the upper deck before the operator noticed his rollerblades, Sol narrowed his eyes and scanned across the river toward his destination. Shifting back and forth on his wheels, he gripped the railing like a caged wild beast. 

If he was hallucinating, finally about to snap despite his best efforts, then the fact that his hallucination stayed on shore proved Sol’s mind was powerful enough to keep the hallucination at bay. If he believed it a demon, it was subject to rules right? A manifestation of his subconscious. Because a hallucination _could_ have followed him onto the ferry. 

But a demon couldn’t.

Right?

Hunching his shoulders deeper into his leather jacket in the late cool summer breeze, old scars crawled and pulled across his chest and back. A chill radiated inward as phantom nails dragged down the skin of his spine and the hairs on the back of his neck rose again. 

He’d read once, that demons and witches couldn’t cross bodies of water. 

The Hudson hardly counted as anything resembling holy water. But it was brackish, where fresh water mingled with the salty Atlantic, and Sol vividly remembered salt being involved in his exorcisms. The ghost of the memory tugged and burned at his scarred skin as if they were carved anew. 

Readjusting his mouth guard with his tongue, Sol focused on the approaching cityscape to chase it away. 

Tall buildings stretched upward, glowing and reflecting the sun dropping low in the sky behind Sol. Twilight lingered, yet the humanity that swirled around him would not stop to watch or hold their breath. Nor did it ever seem they felt the chill of being trapped in the limbo of in between. Venus would make its appearance first, but there would be too many buildings to see the bright planet edging up over the horizon. By the time the brightest starlight of Sirius made its almost nine year journey through the vast emptiness of space, to be greeted by the haze of light pollution in the predawn hours, Sol’s glimpse of the sky would be long blocked from view. 

The thought of his father’s favorite binary star caused a gnawing welling guilt to form in his stomach. Sol still hadn’t greeted the return of the dog star chasing after the hunter to observe the change in season. Hadn’t been able to bring himself to greet it in four years.

With an up lift of the ferry on a wave, Sol rolled backward toward the hard white bench. Cans of spray paint in his bag clinked together, shifting amide his other supplies he never unpacked. Two teens snickered at him, as if he hadn’t done it on purpose. Tilting his head in their direction he met their stares and smiled. Fanged mouthguard in full view, red beset on black, his smile dropped to a smirk at their uncomfortable shifts away from him. Slouching further into his jacket, he ran his calculations to convince himself, and hopefully his brain, this would work. 

Making his way across Manhattan would be enough.

The ferry only took seven minutes, plus the time it took to dock and open the gate. He’d head down the stairs as soon as it was moored, hop over the gate, and take off into the city. 

The fastest way for a demonic car hallucination to get to Manhattan would be the Holland Tunnel. 

With the sun setting on the horizon, the demon would hit the tail end of rush hour. 

Balling hands into the pockets of his father’s leather jacket, a brief flash of warmth tingled through his veins to chase off the ever present chill. 

His phone vibrated in his pocket. Without pulling it out, he flicked it on silent.

By the time Sol’s hallucination finally made it through the tunnel to Manhattan, Sol wouldn’t even be on the island anymore.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Speeding up the shoreline, Sideswipe gave up all pretense of stealth and started manipulating the traffic control lights with localized EM pulses. Every light for him enroute became green and stayed green. Soaring through the EZ Pass lane that humans in their drone cars were too stupid to take, Sideswipe checked his timer set on his chromometer. It took Sideswipe five minutes and seven seconds of _technically_ legal driving to make it to the entrance of the tunnel that would connect him back to his human.

And his human had a twenty-two second head start before Sideswipe had determined his destination. Dread welled in his spark; aching and scraping raw. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. 

But this time, Sideswipe _had_ to be enough. He’d make this work. He’d _make_ his human trust him. 

Triangulating his human’s location through the human communication cellular towers, Sideswipe tried to call him on his communicator. Ask his human Soul to wait for him so Sideswipe could protect him and keep him. He’d even let him sit on his seats if he promised not to leak. 

There was no answer.

Red brake lights up ahead caused Sideswipe to roar and rev in frustration as he whined deep in his spark. Plating vibrating in a burning rage, Sideswipe almost transformed to toss the human drone cars out of his way, when he saw the sign of his salvation. 

Literally.

_Unlawful to change lanes in the tunnel._

The very legal solution was posted on the wall.

A quick scan of the human datanet and his manual proved there was no law against what he was about to do.

If he wasn’t so worried about losing his human, Sideswipe would have laughed as he redistributed mass into subspace, shifted the orientation of his plating, and redlined his acceleration toward the break lights of congested human traffic.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Glen Whitmann rested his knuckles against his cheek as he idly watched the code of his image recognition neural net. It sifted through the video feeds of every traffic camera throughout the United States. His second monitor displayed the same neural net but through international feeds the government had hired Glen to hack.

England really needed to tone it down on their camera feeds of their populous. If a fancy car so much as backfired on the wrong side of the road over there, Glen knew about it. 

Leaning forward, he used his tongue to chase around the straw to his Big Gulp, while he typed a few commands one handed to train his machine learning software to recognize military or construction vehicles in strange areas. When that was done, he’d train it to recognize any new models of concept sports cars that were announced, and all manners of emergency vehicles.

Autobots were vain fuckers, and apparently Decepticons had a type too. 

Finally capturing his straw in his mouth, he took a sip from his soda. 

Bored. 

So fucking bored. His brain cells were dying one by one in this windowless room surrounded by thousands of computer fans whirring at high speed. Rack-mount servers made up his working stiff hell, and the soft clicks of the keyboards around him made him long for his cousin’s stomping feet on his DDR pad. 

A slow death of starvation, that’s what was happening to Glen’s brain. 

Glancing to his right, Maggie was typing away on her keyboard, headphones over her ears, engrossed in her assignment. Snapping his focus back to his own screen of code, Glen wrinkled his nose. He should have never let her convince him to work for the RAND Corporation. Sure, on paper it was better than working for the NSA or any branch of the US government.

Technically they were contractors. A research and development think tank company that offered research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. While the company had branched out to assist in defense and non-defense issues internationally, they were financed by the US government, universities, corporations and private donations.

Maggie had promised they’d have more freedom than the red tape of the government. 

Glen went because their backer was a giant alien space robot who had a vested interested in keeping their presence on the planet quiet, and liked that Glen had never been affiliated with any Earth based government. 

And the simple encrypted text he had received early this morning told him they had lost one of their own, last seen around Princeton. Princeton, that had just been attacked by a man-sized metal bird two hours ago according to reports. How he was going to work _that_ into his recognition neural net, he was still waffling on a fancy name for, Glen had no clue. 

Who would have thought that working for think tank, while secretly helping out giant alien space robots with a fetish for concept cars and trucks that fought the other giant alien space robots with a fetish for military and construction alt modes, and now apparently metal space cassowaries from hell would be boring. 

How that could ever be boring in reality, well here he was, seeping in it - while his brain cells died one by one. 

Desperate for stimulation from multiple sources.

A little silhouette of a dancing figure blinked at the top of his screen, and Glen dropped the straw out of his mouth. Sitting up a little straighter, he glanced around to see if anyone was paying attention to him, then used a keyboard shortcut to access the notification. 

The notification he _may_ have added to the code for his cousin to contact him in a top secret, secure facility. Opening the file, linked him to youtube, and looking forward to some Russian driving shenanigans, he smirked when a dash cam video started to play.

He was hitting Maggie’s arm, standing and pointing before words could form.

“Ow Glen! What!?”

“The silver one. The asshole. The one we were told to stay away from.” Stuttering out his words, excited nonsense spewed forth as he sat back down, cracked his knuckles then started typing. “I found him. He just fucking blew through the Holland Tunnel, eastbound in toward Manhattan.”

Sliding his chair to the side, Glen’s hand quivered as he snatched up his cellphone and he squealed a little inside. Then he dialed the number to a real live alien robot.

Beside him Maggie cracked into New Jersey’s and New York’s transportation system and cursed, “He has locked up stoplights north bound on Green St to Marin Blvd, and West Street southbound along the Hudson. How the fuck - No. _What_ the fuck is he after?”

There was no ring, but Glen replayed the video again for a second time as the deep voice resonated through the receiver. 

“Glen Whitmann.”

“OP baby! Can I call you OP?” Maggie was looking at him with horror and Glen could only hopelessly shrug and mouth that he was talking to a robot alien leader, he didn’t know what the fuck to say.

Reaching out, Maggie grabbed the phone but Glen couldn’t bring himself to let go. Their faces crowded together against his phone, Glen’s stomach was flipping, as Maggie spoke.

“We found your missing member -“

“The silver one with the grumpy face who glares like we might stick to his wheels like gum.” Glen blurted out.

 _What?_ Maggie mouthed at Glen’s outburst.

Glen could only shrug and mouth back that it was true.

“What is his last known location? And do you have an identification on the Decepticon he is after?” Straight to business then, Glen could do that.

“It’s no biggie. He’s just doing mach one through the Holland Tunnel, completely keeping his cover as a human car, if you ignore the fact that HE DROVE ON THE FUCKING ROOF!” 

Glen could have sworn Optimus Prime sighed.

A swat at Glen’s arm for how he was talking to the leader of an alien race, and the only response he could manage to give to Maggie was refreshing the video and pointing. 

A silver concept Corvette, with plating flared out more like a formula race car, blew past over head, knocking lose, and raining down tiles onto commuters. The blockage of fender benders would take hours to clear. Glen replayed it again, and recorded it to his phone then sent the footage to Optimus Prime with his voice commentary.

“That ain’t right.” He shook his head, “But you hired me for my professional opinion, and I can’t tell you that ain’t legal. The law just doesn’t exist yet.”

Glen knew all about legal loopholes. He'd never been sent to jail for any hacking traced to him. He just took advantage of laws that didn't technically exist because the legal system was so fucking slow when it came to technological advancements. They simply couldn't keep up with him.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Sideswipe soared overhead in an unimpeded straight line toward his destined pet human Soul.

His sensors only passively monitored the drone cars upside down beneath him. 

In space, orientation was relative. In this moment everyone else was upside down to Sideswipe. Increasing his acceleration, he tweaked the angle of his restructured plating. Reducing parts of his non-essential mass into subspace to take this configuration, his excessive speed generated enough aerodynamic downforce to keep him pressed against the ceiling. Wind whipping over angled plating like an inverted airfoil, almost three point five g’s of pressure pressed him down in place. 

It took Sideswipe thirty-one agonizing seconds to clear the tunnel. As it came to an end he twisted, plating and mass shifting in and out of subspace, partially transforming to reconfigure himself properly into his human drone car alt mode. The bottom of his chassis spit sparks as he slammed down in a space between cars swerving wildly to the sides at his sudden appearance between them. 

Dropping sharp anchors, he tore through concrete to decelerate around the curve of the off ramp. Pulsing electro-magnetic pulses toward the unshielded stoplights, he forced all the lights in a one mile radius to stay green. 

His chronometer was ticking. 

And based on his triangulation now that he knew his human’s communication frequency, his formidable human was on the move.

A beat. 

A heart beat. 

Sideswipe was in range, and his plating relaxed slightly from his frame. Calculating the telemetry of his human, Sideswipe moved over to the right lane, and prepared to open his passenger door to sweep his pet up to where no shark could harm him.

His human entered visual range rolling up a cross street, and Sideswipe pushed his engine harder, clearing intersections between lanes honking to the humans to get out of his way.

He had him. Sideswipe had the right of way, his fleshie had a red light, there was no park or alley to dart into, he’d be forced to slow. 

Target locked on his fleshie, Sideswipe’s spark bounced about in its casing in anticipation.

Then his Soul’s wet, fleshie, disgustingly brilliant blue optics locked on Sideswipe. His dermis layer lost luster, going ashy grey. The muscles around his jaw clenched tight, and he narrowed his optics. Unbelievably he increased his pace and charged toward Sideswipe as if they were on a battlefield. 

And Sideswipe couldn’t help his squawk and screech of frustration as his human beat his calculations, jumped, and rolled wheeled pedes straight across Sideswipe’s hood.

Leaving two slagging filthy organic streaks behind on the surface.

His vulnerable human darted straight through the intersection and a sharp shriek shot from Sideswipe’s engine as he narrowly missed a blue drone car, and dodged toward a transport truck he didn’t see. Wheels squealing in a wide arch, Sideswipe took a sharp left, causing the cars around him to slam to a halt. Half transformed to grab him, Sideswipe’s cortex predicted that his fleshie might pop apart as he slammed into his sharp metal hands. 

The fraction of a second hesitation doomed him.

Sideswipe’s spark flared out in equal parts warning and longing.

Dropping low, his human glided underneath it, wheels spitting sparks and shiny golden flimsy excuse for armor reflecting how narrowly he came to scraping his helm on the lower side rail. Cleared from eminent squishing, Sideswipe restarted all his systems he didn’t know he had paused, and squeezed between traffic leaving a smoking pile up in his wake.

As his fleshie darted up a thin lane designated for bicycles, Sideswipe took solace that at least he was driving the right direction up a one way street as he roared after him.

He’d be sure to point that out to Optimus. 

After he pried slag sucking trust out of his human.

And put him on a fragging leash until he learned to come when called.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

The roaring sound of a high performance engine to his left caused the blood to drain from Sol’s head.

Clenching his jaw, Sol ignored how his heart sank to his stomach. It was impossible. No car could have made it through the Holland Tunnel that fast.

There was only one conclusion Sol’s mind grasped, and it caused whispers to form in chants, reaching up to swallow him in the past. 

Pushing off harder on his rollerblades, his quad muscles burned as he rushed to prove them all wrong. Iron resolve filled him and he raced to match it. He launched. Pulling his knees up high, Sol ignored mirrored chrome and fantasies of starlight as his wheels glided smoothly across the curved surface. His wheels slammed back down to concrete with a hard jolt to his knees, and he darted against red light traffic.

Spinning to the side, a blue sedan narrowly ghosted by his side as the demon squealed and roared out behind him. 

White filled his vision, a digital shriek skittered across his brain and the next thing he knew, he had dropped low. Head tucked down, he dragged his wrist guard across the concrete. The trailing edges of the wind ghosting against his face was much too close as it passed over head. Rising up with a stumble, he found his footing and he didn’t look back. Heart trying to escape his chest, Sol could only dig deeper and push harder as a squeal of tires, and the echo of that shriek replayed the feel of buzzing electric charge contracting through his muscles.

Raging against the voices of his past and hot spray of red across his face; a fury sparked deep at his core and he fanned it into a storming tempest. 

The burning deep in his muscles fought against the doubt threatening to overwhelm him and he lost himself movement.

Modern glass buildings gave way to red brick as he hopped up and down off sidewalks and back to the bike lane. Refusing to admit how terrified he was to wake up from his psychotic break dripping red, he pushed hard toward City Hall.

One block. Sparks shot out from his wheels as he slid over a metal grate then darted around a bicycle. Startled swears were left in his wake; more than half of them came from his own mouth.

Two. The burn flared through his core, lungs aching, sweat trickling and heart pounding. 

Three. He could practically feel his hallucination chasing him down, and he leapt in a half running glide to skate up over a white car to add the buffer between them.

Four. His mouth was dry and his throat scratched for relief as the silent scream he held inside built to an eruption point. 

Skating straight through traffic across Broadway, horns blared and he sought refuge in a park. The shouts from behind him should have brought comfort that others could see his own personal demon chasing him down. 

But what gnawed worse at the center of the storm ranging inside him was that those voices were _right_ , and Satan had come to collect his minion from the satanic pact his family had made.

Sol wouldn’t go without a fight, and he’d show them fucking gushing sprays of red. 

Skidding by a hot dog stand, sparks shot out from his wheels as Sol armed himself. Spinning around, he skated backwards and snarled. Squeezing his hands down on his weapons, twin arks of red shot out and splashed across impeccable finish.

He swore the car shuddered. Sol ignored the tinny skitter of data that shrieked out across his brain and into his ears with each splatter trailing up toward the windshield. 

And Sol couldn’t help the feral grin that formed of his face as he vindictively unloaded two whole bottles of ketchup across that custom mirrored hood of Satan’s Corvette, driving along behind him -

Straight through City Hall Park, in lower Manhattan.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

_Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. EW. EW. STOP IT! FRAGGING EW WHAT THE FRAG IS - GET IT OFF! WHAT IF IT LEECHES DOWN INTO MY INTERNALS? I’M GOING TO WRAP YOU UP IN CELLOPHANE AND PUT YOU ON A FRAGGING LEASH YOU DISGUSTING DERMAL SACK OF LEAKY OOZE._

His evil human Soul grinned and bared his teeth in what Sideswipe image matched as maniacally for his species. Relentless, streaming trails of ooze continued to rain down upon Sideswipe as he drove after him. His soon-to-be pet human’s chemical weapon assault of the glucose and light acid he deployed continued in relentless sputtering streams, despite Sideswipe’s Cybertronian cursing and threats.

Not pleas. Never pleas. Sideswipe didn’t plead for anything.

In a feeble frantic attempt to remove the foreign repulsive substance without transforming, he activated the windshield wipers and solution of his Earth based alt mode. With a combined shriek of disgust and a roar of his engine, Sideswipe clamped his plating tight as his actions did little more than dilute it and smear it across his windshield in streaking arches. It wasn’t like Sideswipe needed his windshield to _see_ he had no optics in this form at all.

But he could feel it dripping across his tactile sensor net.

He shuddered; whined. Under his wheel he could almost feel the rabbit popping apart again in slow motion. The disgusting sludgy feeling of it creeping in the wind around his frame, wedged in his grill and bouncing up against his -

A pulse. Warm, comforting and with a tinge of regret shot through his frame as his irreplaceable disgustingly perfect pet activated. Engine going abruptly silent, as if any sound or movement would shatter the feeling, Sideswipe locked his wheels and slid to a halt.

His human froze, the feral grin gone abruptly from his face, angled wheeled pedes slid and ground him to a halt. 

Together they stopped and stared in the middle of a zone designated not for driving, as Sideswipe scanned his human.

Elevated heart rate, dihydrogen monoxide with trace elements such as saline, phosphorus, alpha hydroxy acid, and carbamide dripped down his brow. His human was undergoing thermoregulation.

Another pulse. Tentative, reaching, seeking.

Heavy respiration. Laboured. Difficulty swallowing.

Two.

Cross referencing: heavy perspiration and respiration, elevated heart rate, labored breathing, dry mouth.

The first four results from WebMD almost caused Sideswipe’s spark to gutter. A quick scan of his heart ruled out atrial flutter, ventricular spatial defect, or heart rhythm disorder. A scan of his lungs ruled out a lung condition known as asthma. 

Which left the top results as…

Sideswipe sank on his wheels with a soft hydraulic hiss that caused his human to jump, and Sideswipe’s spark to pulse with his EM field in support.

Three.

His human pet was generally anxious, experiencing a panic attack, or an acute stress reaction.

Or perhaps…exercise was important for human pet health…but over exertion apparently lead to muscle aches, dehydration, headache and - 

His weak fleshie leg muscles _were_ shaking. Small tremors detectable through his cloth coverings by Sideswipe’s sensors but not through the standard human visual range. Sideswipe could help with that, then get him some dihydrogen monoxide to drink.

Carefully, silently, Sideswipe rolled closer. 

Other disgusting fleshies were shouting and screaming around him but Sideswipe filtered them all out as irrelevant. Sideswipe’s human and his continued functioning was all that mattered. And he stayed obediently put, frozen and staring back while still perfectly activated. 

Unable to control his slight wiggle on his chassis at the waves of warm, soothing contentment in his spark, Sideswipe flashed his headlights in greeting again, and attempted to mimic the frame language in the videos he had watched on happy pets. Popping open his passenger door in invitation, Sideswipe tried really hard not to scan and dwell on how much his human was leaking from every gland. Rolling a little closer, he attempted to entice him to sit, rest, or curl up and have a nap while Sideswipe brought him to the nearby dihydrogen monoxide well gushing not that far away.

One red projectile, then a second bounced off his hood, clearing his sensor net with no alerts they were inbound. With a startled embarrassing beep he would never admit, his alarm system went of, his lights flashed, and his door slammed shut. Spark aching and torn abruptly in two directions, his human Soul stopped functioning correctly, turned and fled off into traffic.

Sideswipe pursued him without conscious movement -

Straight into Sideswipe’s feral human’s second attack.

A larger metal cylinder was pulled down in Sideswipe’s path, colliding against Sideswipe’s hood.

The purpose of his first attack became uncomfortably clear. 

The heavy cylinder didn’t leave so much as a dent against his cybertronium plating, but the disgusting human slag of organic drippings and pulp clung to Sideswipe’s hood. Lighter bits fluttering, stuck and held in place by the the red, light acidic, glucose. It stuck and pulled in the wind as he accelerated.

Sideswipe caught himself, freezing his sequence before he transformed then revved his engine in a roar. If he sliced apart the repulsive cylinder to take out his aching frustration, Optimus would never let him keep his human pet. 

The damage he had caused in Buenos Aires when he landed in pursuit of Demolisher almost had Optimus stripping Sideswipe’s plating. 

Clearing the area he really shouldn’t have followed into, his human darted up a narrow centre road for pedestrians and Sideswipe mapped it while his spark soared. 

A trap. 

Sideswipe could trap him. There was one exit off that bridge, assuming sharktopus stayed on the west coast of this land mass anyway.

Hot tires burned against asphalt, and Sideswipe made a hard right onto Park Row.

No one was parking or rowing and Sideswipe continued to fume in the recesses of his cortex as his fearsome human continued to elude him. Human signs designated in the Earth language of English continued to make no logistical sense, and it was just one more thing that compiled under the long list of _everything_ indescribable that was fragging him off. 

His human on his sensors, Sideswipe honked his horn continuously to little avail for him to slow down, while he compiled his options.

Solution one: capture his pet human - become one with the Poke Ball. Sideswipe was a master already at perfecting his timing and spinning technique. But his human pet had already jumped over him once in defensive evasive maneuvers. Sideswipe had to work on his rebound, and keep the g-force limits down so his human’s internal fluids didn’t slush to the back of his body and starve him of oxygen in his brain.

At least until Sideswipe could get him a suit with air bladders. And that was just his limit to positive g-forces. Sideswipe’s sudden acceleration on the tunnel roof might have killed him.

Solution two: his anxious-fearsome human Soul needed a fragging collar and a leash so Sideswipe could keep him nearby. How could he gain his trust and prove he could take care of him if he kept running away into traffic without permission?

The walkway between them rose and Sideswipe squawked as his human Soul rose up above him on a center walkway of the bridge darting among his own kind. Sideswipe ghosted him from below, weaving between traffic and listening to his racing heartbeat. The red, organic, mostly glucose and a light acid, oozed up the front of his hood.

Organic pulp fluttered and dragged up, spraying off in the wind coated in red ooze. 

As he stuck close to his potentially anxious, panicking, and probably requiring hydration human, Sideswipe for once regretted checking the datanet for potential unexpected exits for anxious or panicked humans off of bridges. Anxiety welled deep in his own spark, as he examined the footage. He wouldn’t let his destined human Soul jump or fall. He’d break all Optimus’ fragging stupid rules before he let that happen. Keeping his human’s racing heartbeat in his speakers, and increased thermoregulation in his processor, Sideswipe stopped his honking, refrained from revving his engine, starting music or startling his human in any way.

He tried to travel silently along below him, weaving among traffic as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge together. Proving he could protect him, he’d be right here next to him the entire way.

 _Then_ he’d catch him.

Regret was a strange feeling for Sideswipe, and as it emanated from his spark he almost didn’t recognize it. In hindsight, Sideswipe knew he shouldn’t have transformed at his human’s dwelling. It had been too soon. According to the datanet of his human’s vital signs, Sideswipe had scared him. He always scared and infuriated everyone, but for some reason this bothered him more than the rest. Probably because this time Sideswipe was actually trying so hard to do everything right and by the rules but like always, his spark hurt, and Soul wouldn’t _listen_ and stay fragging activated!

When he caught him though, he’d wrap him up tight. Wrapping in a blanket seemed to be a convergent theme both for feisty stressed kittens, and human aftercare. Pet humans were sometimes referred to as kittens on the information boards Sideswipe had analyzed.

And Sideswipe’s human was definitely a feisty kitten in need of punishment and aftercare.

One problem remained with that plan.

Sideswipe didn’t have a blanket.

Casting a few of his internal sensors toward his human’s boot wrapped tight against his seat, Sideswipe found a solution that was close enough. 

He’d improvise.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

_It’s not a fucking puppy._

_It’s not a fucking puppy._

_It’s not a fucking puppy._

_You didn’t hurt it with ketchup._

Didn’t he want to hurt it? 

That thought twisted his stomach for some reason, like it had in the park when he swore he heard the car whimper.

Then he felt it. Not the endless feeling, but distress, disgust, and frustration as the ketchup slowly slid down his own chest like the congealed blood of a rabbit popping apart under -

Shaking his head, Sol’s world tilted momentarily as his eyesight went white around the edges then cleared. With another deep inhale through his nose, he twisted around a tourist standing in the middle of the walkway taking a selfie; focusing as much as he could on navigating the final half of the bridge. Blurs of colour and sound became minor obstacles to weave around as he pushed hard to his refuge. It wasn’t that far from his apartment. Despite cutting through Jersey City, and across lower Manhattan, since he got off the ferry he had only bladed one and a half, two miles at most. He knew he could do much farther. But his leg muscles were shaking, he was tensing more from his core to stay balanced, and he was getting light headed while his stomach simultaneously rumbled and contorted.

His glitching brain had freaked him out with the microwave. He hadn’t had anything to eat for dinner, and his strenuous race against Satan’s Mirrored Corvette was sapping all his energy.

The rage and determination that had flared inside of him had been blown out by that phantom whimper. He didn’t know what was real anymore. His sanity was breaking apart at the seams, folding in seventeen dimensions, then snapping back together into three. 

_You almost got in the car._

Terror gripped inside while a sadness welled in his chest: a sharp, stabbing ache of burning betrayed agony when he had turned away. Lashing out with the garbage can, the hard thunk he had heard of its collision, had made him rub at his chest. Muddled inside, his brain seemed incapable of not making his thoughts complicated. 

The people around him were going about their lives, and Sol could pass among them. Hiding his exhaustion, at times his body could feel like a robot being piloted by someone else. Events could happen around him, and tears would no longer form. Sol was there, he was always there, but everything else around him felt dull, muted, and distorted like he was missing one of his five senses. A layer of detachment would form, blocking him from himself and the world around him ceased feeling real. When feeling got to be too much, it became as if he was playing a first person video game in his own life. He wondered only once aloud to one person, if he had felt too much in the past, that his brain had just learned to switch his emotions off.

A survival mechanism of the brain, the therapist Maya had taken him to had explained.

It was easier to push everyone around him away than to confront his past. Lash out for the space he needed when old fears rose, and it seemed like no one understood how he could feel nothing. Lash out so he could save his energy for the few things that might still bring him joy. 

Moments of joy, focusing on the present and updating his body chemistry from fight or flight when surrounded by safety he had been told, could help break him out of his dissociation. 

But if he couldn’t feel joy…? He had been too afraid of the answer to ask.

Winnie had taught him to channel his destructive habits and energy into motion so he didn’t punch walls or people in frustration -

He never told her he did it partially in order to feel pain. 

Pain was tangible.

It was something.

Anything, other than the numbness inside. Somewhere between his begging and pleading surrounded by chants, Sol had learned to slam down a shield around himself, and seek comfort in pain. 

Darting around a father with his daughter on his shoulders, pointing at the stonework arches and network of cables of the bridge, Sol was careful not to startle them too much. Drifting past them in a wide semicircle, he almost collided with a bike, but he hadn’t ruined their moment together. 

His father’s leather jacket didn’t breath well under exertion. It weighed heavy on his shoulders. Sweat trickled down his back, his t-shirt plastered against him by his bouncing backpack. Yet his skin formed goosebumps. He shivered. Cold, clammy, and - 

Something indescribable inside him tugged as he predicted his shattered future alone -

A glint of golden yellow reflected off mirrored chrome down to his right. The bridge’s lights, streaking across polished plating. Perfection he longed to feel again interrupted by the mess he had made on the hood. 

_You wanted to get in the car._

Tightness welled inside, a spark of regret and longing tried to ignite, but the inside of Sol was engulfed in a pervasive damp coiling down to a bone chilling cold of raw misery. He turned his head away as his stomach growled and he struggled to swallow. Heavy breath sucked in cold through his nose, dried the back of his throat. His mouth felt like he had been chewing cotton. 

Hungry.

He was hungry, tired, and he needed a fucking drink that was all. 

Pushing forward, he caught himself as he stumbled on a crack, then dug deep for extra reserves he used to survive. 

He struggled not to dwell on the future. His plans and dream of breaking the pattern he used to give himself comfort was shattering into fiction. There seemed to be a finite number of times he could watch his dreams shatter before something inside him broke. His brain had started fabricating the joy of drafting in perfect harmony with a car that would be forever out of Sol’s price range. Staying in one place was a mistake, he carried his own prison with him in body and mind, and Sol was fucking losing it. 

He didn’t know who or what he was anymore. He didn’t want to feel what it was like as those whispers about him were confirmed. 

Clawing through the shield of dissociation threatening to fall, there was pain in misery. And old friend he could define and make a physical reality, his to control. Muscle tissue tore as he clenched his teeth down on his mouth guard and pushed himself beyond his limits. 

The burning pain ached with every breath, the wind whipped cold and sharp around his ears, and he ran the map to his destination through his brain.

Just another two miles to Navin station, should take him ten minutes. 

His body had to last that long before shaking muscles collapsed and he inhaled the familiar putrid musty air in the dark through the cracks of the city beyond the maps. He only had one fucking boot, the bearings in his wheels would get destroyed, but he could disappear into the network of abandoned subway tunnels.

As the pedestrian walkway in the center of two lanes of opposing traffic leveled out back down to street level, polished chrome and city lights coasted beside him. City lights reflecting on that surface, streaking like trailing starlight, so close he could move over and reach it.

But instead of reaching to grasp that endless, limitless feeling, Sol chose the familiar comfort of pain in the convergence of hard limits in order to feel a semblance of joy.

A weak smirk tugging at the edge of his mouth, Sol didn’t wait until the sidewalk hit the end before he dragged his wheels. Shooting out sparks from his strikers as he lost speed, his left hand coasted on the cold metal railing. Before his momentum ground to a halt, his body was lifting up over the barrier with the screeching shriek of data across his brain and the squeal of tires and shifting metal in his ears.

Sol landed on his own two feet: straight into opposing traffic.

A car mirror clipped the edge of his backpack and he spun. When his body struggled to produce more adrenaline to pulse through him in his exhausted state, he stumbled.

Streaks of swerving headlights became balls of flaming starlight barreling toward him as the electric pain from the _feel_ of hot terrified data echoing through every fibre and neuron made him wince. Symbols danced around him, blinding him in intensity in seventeen dimensions, at least four of which warped space time. The silent scream for help he held inside didn't erupt out his throat.

A pulse. A wave of radiation he could feel more than see shot out like the gravitational well of a star.

Sol always knew he was living on borrowed time, and chose to spend it trying to feel by teasing death.

He knew he couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the way, but hot electric charge shot through his muscles, contracting them outside his control toward his right. Stars filled his darkening vision, every pulse of his heartbeat became deafening and he jumped; tucked tight. 

Bracing for impact, hoping to roll more or less over the hood, Sol’s reality shattered, snapping back to three dimensions by the hard limits of flesh and bone.

As the shield between his dissociation of emotional and physical pain threatened to fall; a sharp, deadly silver metal shield reconstructed around him.

And took the blow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who wants to see something awesome? You do! [Clicky Clicky](https://greenapplefreak.deviantart.com/art/Castor-and-Pollux-708939465) and go see GreenAppleFreak's FanArt of Sideswipe and Sol on DeviantART. You won't regret it, Sideswipe and Sol look stunning and you can bask in the subtle astronomy nerdery in the background. (I'm still not over that perspective angle of Sideswipe btw, and you giving him red rims was definitely more awesome than my plan for ketchup XD)
> 
> [Fun Fact About Aerodynamics:](https://www.formula1.com/en/championship/inside-f1/understanding-f1-racing/Aerodynamics.html)  
> "Planes use their wings to create lift, race cars use theirs to create negative lift, better known as downforce. A modern Formula One car is capable of developing 3.5 g lateral cornering force (three and a half times its own weight) thanks to aerodynamic downforce. That means that, theoretically, at high speeds they could drive upside down."
> 
> So in my head, Mirage and Blurr can definitely do this. But I tend to head canon Bayverse as a lot more transformable? Is that a thing? In my head it's a thing. We see them take on other alt modes easily in the films.


	9. Lost in Translation

The smell of molten metal and engine grease assaulted him as his glitching mind _felt_ a blade extend from his hand and impale the oncoming SUV. Sparks flew, but from deadly blade, not the strikers in a juvenile parody of what he called his roller _blades_. He hardly had to weigh the weapon down. Momentum of the forward moving target did more than half the work. The material: weak and flimsy. It sliced clean. Straight down the center of the oncoming car. The two screaming people in the front seat: impassively disregarded. Each individual, once joined now separated from the other.

The metal shifted. Encasing him alive.

Breathe.

He forgot how to breathe.

Cans of spray paint dug into his back through flimsy leather. The back of his helmeted head whacked hard against an unforgiving surface, slamming his teeth against the cushion of a mouthguard. 

Sol lay stunned. Metal shifted into the ceiling of a car above him while he was gaping, mouth now open for a breath that wouldn’t come. He _felt_ shocks take the hard impact of tires on pavement and an impact beneath him.

His lungs refused to fill with air. A ringing white noise blanketed his existence. There was no sound in space.

A vacuum. He was in the vacuum of space. Tiny pin pricks alit across his view, drifting toward him instead of away from him. Each tiny star starting from a central point and fanning out like a burst in straight lines.

Light can only travel outward from a source in straight lines.

_Unless it refracts from one medium to another. Bent from the path it was on. Broken._

_Unless the structure of light was changed._

_Unless a large mass pulled light toward it: bending it, forcing light to curve around it._

His thoughts displayed in shifting symbols among the stars. He couldn’t read them but he knew what they said.

The speed of light on a straight path was a constant through the vacuum of space. Until it wasn’t.

He blinked and they were gone.

Sol’s head hurt, throbbed with an internal pressure. The edges of his vision blacked out into a tunnel of an endless void.

His stomach flipped, pulling tight as saliva welled in his mouth. The visual distortion creating biofeedback that he might have a migraine.

His muscles trembled. Cold.

No matter how much he gasped, his lungs wouldn’t work. There was nothing to breath in and nothing to breath out. No one could hear him beg or scream in agony.

His view tilted and spun. Orientation and relative motion held no common reference point in a field of stars that burst across his vision upon impact. Unable to straighten his legs, his muscles spasmed. Wheels rolled and refused purchase against a shifting surface. Arm hair stood on end and goosebumps formed across his skin.

It was so cold in space.

A flash of light. A burst of heat. A window forming around him, and he coasted left to the scent of burning rubber.

Scraping knives of ten thousand kitchens worth of shifting metal rose through the deafening white noise, then halted. The crumpling collision of plastic crumple zones of cars piled up behind him like soda cans. Car horns blared. His muscle tremors stopped when the metal settled.

For a moment, only the rushing of blood through his body and his thumping heartbeat remained. 

Then sirens blared in the distance, warm air blasted, and his first breath of life came.

Sol had almost forgotten how much his lungs liked the taste of air. 

In a shallow gasp, he drank it in. Then another, followed by a large gulp.

His scratchy dry throat rebelled, and he coughed. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. Rolling over on the soft backseat, his bent legs dropped partially into a narrow footwell while he struggled to breathe and hack out coughs at the same time. His left arm trembled to support him as he rested the front of his helmet in the crook of his right arm. 

A soft, quick, and hesitant poke at his back was hardly a touch at all, but it sent Sol’s mind into a tailspin. A pit formed in his stomach as the heavy, stifling scent of incense cones dropping hot ash flared at the site of touch on his back. His left hand balancing on the floor, wrapped tight around a bar of familiar metal.

With an uncontrolled arching twist, Sol retaliated. 

His swinging hook bar knocked aside a metal cable and it recoiled under a driver’s seat. Sol scrambled back with a curse, spray paint clanking in his backpack against the side of the car, as he pulled his feet up on the seat. Two other metallic, segmented armored cables reared back away from him, hovering like angry cobras tracking his every movement. There were strange filaments on the ends, centered between six metal pinchers. Shifting and billowing, the filaments moved like hair spread and drifting underwater - or a snake smelling the air by taste. They glowed at the tip of each thin strand; living fiberoptic cables. There were no eyes or cameras, but they sent a shiver of unease through Sol. 

He swore they were watching him somehow. 

He kept his breath shallow, and tried not to twitch a muscle as he stared back at them. 

“You know what? I tried.” Sol’s stomach bottomed out, and he could feel the blood drain from his face as the voice from his phone echoed from all around him. “I tried really hard, but you simply belong with me now. I’m tired of following the rules.”

Shifting his focus warily from those cables, Sol looked toward the driver.

The carbon copy of himself, sat staring straight out the windshield covered in smeared ketchup, stopped like everything was perfectly fine at a red light.

“You are infuriatingly disgusting by the way.” One of the cables twitched and Sol could almost imagine those fiberoptic filaments and pinchers were rubbing their figurative fine tendrils together like fingers dragged through grease. “You’re lucky I even let you in here, but I’m tired of worrying you are about to pop like a crushed rabbit under a wheel when Busatron drives over your fleshie aft.” The driver’s mouth moved but his voice…came from the speakers, “Don’t worry though, I’ve done all my research and I ordered you a blanket on Amazon.”

Sol swallowed the lump in his throat. Mouth dry, and his heart had never hammered so hard.

The demonic copy of himself turned his head back toward Sol half twisted in the narrow backseat. A large toothy smile formed, eyes burning like a metal melting electric blue flame. 

“So trust me.” The voice over the speakers said, “C’mon kitten. You can trust me.” 

Sol’s stomach contorted, and bile rose in his throat. 

Human heads…didn’t turn that far backward.

“You’ve come to collect me.” Sol’s voice came out as a whisper to himself.

“Exactly!” The metal pinchers on those two cables clicked together like evil metal fingers, “Clearly, you are my human soul. Wild, feral and - I mean, I’ll have to leash train you until you learn how to come when called, because after slicing that car in half that was going to spray your organic goo everywhere, I’m gonna need you to put in a good word for me about how great I am, and how much you trust me but I -“ 

The cables moved forward toward Sol’s face and when he flinched they moved back, “Do you think you could activate for me again? It’s gross enough having you inside oozing your thermoregulation around in my backseat. I’d rather not touch you to activate you and once you’re trained to stay nearby, and I get you some proper armor, I can let you live outside, but you probably need a rest and some water first so just let me put a little distance between us and your dart into traffic I had to redirect and we can pick up your blanket. I got same day delivery, just lay down and rest and -“

The demon kept talking. 

Staring straight at Sol with a creepy ass smile, mouth moving like a video file with lagging sound, and not watching the traffic he was weaving through. His indicator light kept activating as he changed lanes and he -

Rambling…the demon was rambling about keeping Sol for a pet, and bringing him home to activate him. 

Hand wrapping tighter around the hook he used for snagging wheel wells in traffic, Sol tensed his muscles. The top of his mouth was starting to curl up.

He was _no one’s_ fucking pet.

And humans didn’t have a fucking _soul_. 

Jerking up from the back seat, he swung out against the hovering cables. Like the first, they retracted, but Sol didn’t stop at his victory. He lunged forward, locking his hook bar over the driver seat to pry it against the demon’s neck to -

Phase straight through it? 

“What the fuck -” Sol stared stunned as the demon copy of his face tilted up its head, smiling up at Sol, then evaporated into nothing. 

“OH FRAG.” A cable shot out from the driver side wheel well, “No you don’t. No tools inside me!”  
Fine tendril filaments extended and wrapped around his wrist, the hairs on his arm arched straight up. Another cable latched on to the metal bar in his hand, pulling and attempting to pry it free from his tight grasp. “Let me have it - uh what was the command? Drop it? Drop it!”

Clenching his hands tighter around his hook bar, and his teeth down on his mouth guard, Sol made a final stand against his sanity and threw all reason out the window. 

Grimacing against the light charge burning on his wrist, he locked his knees at the back of the driver’s seat in a ridiculous parody motion of choking the head rest as he tugged back against those cables. 

“YOU FUCKING DEMON SMART CAR FROM HELL! I’M GOING TO SHRED YOU INTO PARTS, WELD YOUR REMAINS INTO A SCULPTURE, AND TOSS YOU IN THE HUDSON!”

The cables froze for a moment, trembled slightly then resumed tugging. “Drop it! I said drop it!”

“YOU DROP IT. I’M NOT YOUR FUCKING PET SOUL. IT’S SOL! S-O-L YOU IDIOT. NOT S-O-U-L. It means -“

“Shit outta luck!” Sol froze and blinked at the smiling demonic copy that appeared in the passenger seat, this time with a red t-shirt the color of ketchup. The demon tilted his head to the side and smiled.

“YOU FUCKER!” Sol attempted to jab out his elbow to break the demon’s fucking mocking face. The copy of Sol evaporated into nothing again.

“We aren’t playing tug.” The voice from the speakers lowered his tone, “ _Drop it!_ ” 

The cables pulled taught, and Sol took a calculated risk.

He let go. 

His metal hook bar went flying at the steering wheel as the engine shrieked. Car swerving, Sol yanked up the emergency break as he lunged into the drivers seat. Back wheels locked, the back end of the possessed car fishtailed with a screech. Rollerblade wheels spinning out under him, he lost traction as he scrambled forward to take control. Half in the driver seat, hand on the steering wheel, his legs twisting up into the air he pulled himself forward. Until creepy filament tipped cables clamped around his ankles and yanked into the passenger seat. 

He fought against the restraints and the chants in his mind. Slamming his foot against the window as he screamed didn’t break it, and the cables pulled his legs downward.

“YOU SLIMEY DEMONIC - SOULS DON’T - YOU ARE JUST SOME KIND OF DEMENTED, OUT OF CONTROL CONCEPT UBER!“ Sol lunged for the wheel, got one hand on it, only to have his arms yanked back, his shoulder shoved to force him to sit, and the passenger seatbelt lock him into place. “LET ME THE FUCK - ”

A restraint shot out around his mouth. Another slithered over the front of his helmet and Sol’s head was pinned back to the passenger seat.

The parking brake clicked back down on its own, and the Corvette corrected itself.

“There now.” He swore the malfunctioning car sighed out its vents in relief, “All nice and wrapped up to help you calm down.” A third cable slithered back under the driver seat, bringing Sol’s hook bar with it. “You are a feisty little kitten aren’t you? I mean I knew that, I’ve been watching you and trying to get your attention since yesterday. You aren’t very observant, and it’s annoying.”

Hands clenching tight, Sol dug the tips of his fingers into the sides of the seat.

“Ah Ah Ah.” The chiding voice from the possessed car’s speakers chastised. “No scratching, or I’ll have to put tinfoil on my seats to scare you off.”

The cables extended and pulled his hands under the waist belt and trapped them on his legs.

What. The. Everliving fuck?

“Sol then? That’s your name? You certain it’s not S-O-L-E like the boot?” The glove compartment popped open and Sol’s missing kidnapped boot rolled out onto his lap.

The restraint across his mouth slowly retracted, and Sol took one breath. 

Two.

“See? You can -“

“BITS!” Sol tried to shift away from the hard cans pressing against the back and jerk forward. “TINY METAL BITS. I’M GOING TO STRIP YOU FOR PARTS AND BACK A MAC TRUCK OVER -”

The seatbelt wrapped tight against his mouth again, muffling his frantic fury. Fuming a frustrated scream through his nose, Sol lifted his legs up and slammed his rollerblades down. The glove compartment slammed closed before Sol could tear it off its hinge. The filament tipped cables wrapped around his ankles again like twin menacing constrictors, and locked his feet down into the foot well.

“I’ll…take that as a no.”

There was silence for a moment, the lights on the dash flashing as Sol tried to squirm his hands free from the bottom half of the seatbelt pinning his wrists to the tops of his legs. Maybe he could wiggle out the restraints to grab the gear shift, stripping some gears in the process, or move into the driver’s seat to find an override, take control and - 

“Sol.” The voice spoke again from the speakers, “Armenian, Uzbek, Korean and Kazkh for left. Turkish and Azerbaijani for left-hand, left-wing. Amharic, Galician, Khmer, and French for ground, plus Romanian for ground, soil, earth, and dirt. Nyanja for floor. Indonesian for welt. Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Polish, Slovak, and Bosnian for salt. Urdu for civil. Catalan for sun, single or only. Danish, Corsican, Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish, Basque, Portuguese, Spanish and Latin for sun. Also Latin for sunlight and sunshine. Hebrew for of and…” 

The sudden onslaught of information that had just spewed out of the speakers caused Sol to still in his bonds as his mind raced to follow along.

“And potentially Persian for tuberculosis, but I’m not confident I translated that properly, and you’ll be pleased to know I scanned your lungs regardless and you are tuberculosis free.”

Sol could only blink as his mind raced and struggled to catch up. This was _real_. This was happening. He should have been hit by a car. What had happened? His mind wasn’t this fucked up to come up with…whatever this was.

His eyes shifted toward the empty driver’s seat. Then why was he hallucinating a possessed copy of himself that kept disappearing?

“The Sundanese for Sol though…I’m uncertain it makes you fish-like or like the bottom of a boot. You did give me a boot so we’ll go with that translation.” Sol looked back toward the dashboard controls, and motion out the front of the windshield smeared with red drew his attention. 

“And the Telugu for Sol…that means…the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal…I _knew it_ \- see!”

All Sol could see was the quickly approaching back of a transport truck. He tried to slam his feet against the bottom of the car to get the stupid nightmare to use its breaks.

“Anyway. Hello! Greetings! Hallo! Hola! Mirë dita! Zdravo! Bula! Nǐ Hǎo! - how many languages do you speak?” The wheel jerked to the side, causing Sol’s stomach to lurch. 

“I’m Sideswipe!”

Sol's muffled yell was ignored as the driverless demonic possessed or malfunctioning experimental AI car weaved recklessly through traffic. It slid straight across three lanes with barely inches to spare. 

Horns echoed out behind him, but it wouldn’t shut up.

“That’s English…for Sideswipe!”

He went back again, crossing three lanes of traffic then slamming to a halt at a red light.

“‘Toughpuncher,’ ‘Striker,’ and ‘Arrow’ were close when I translated my name. I really wanted ‘Horizontal Cannon’ but Ironh -“ The steering wheel twitched, and the engine vibrations launched up Sol’s legs from the floor from a sudden rev. “Anyway, based on the combined translation of your alt mode designation options…”

It trailed off and the lights on its dash flickered briefly then flared.

“Congratulations! You are now destined to be called my fearsome ‘left-hand salty sun-spark of Earth.”

The light turned green and the computer glitching hell spawn demon named Sideswipe roared through the intersection. Sol’s mind was forming questions, grasping for a reality, some principle he could use to help calm himself down. 

“I’m thinking…I might call you Sunshine for short. I haven’t decided. What do you think?”

The restraint - a seat belt from the backseat? - retracted slowly again, ghosting across his lips and making them itch. And Sol pointedly looked out the window tracking his location. A street sign moved past the window, as if Sol was stationary and the world outside of this car moved on without him. His heart rate calmed, the metal cans jabbing against his back now a comfort instead of a hindrance. He rubbed his lips together to remove the itch then snapped his focus to the dash navigation center that would lit up with the voice. 

“I know, I know” Sideswipe continued as if Sol had responded, “Most human pet names in English statistically end in an _’eee'_ sound. I’ll think of something, but let’s try out Sunshine first. You’re going to love being my pet human by the way, I have so much to offer.”

As the possessed car continued to chatter on, Sol’s eyes grew huge.

“I got you a shiny silver thermal blanket so you match me, and then I added in some cellophane I need to wrap you in so you can keep your disgusting fluids to yourself. You’ll be relieved to know I also have a plug for your butt on order.”

It said it so casually, but the cables wrapped around Sol’s legs now took on a more sinister connotation in his mind. 

Sol swallowed, the cotton feeling in his mouth reminding him of more pressing needs, a plan based on his resources finally formed in his mind along with a horrifying conclusion. 

“I’m thirsty.” He tested, and the lights on the dash lit up. He continued more boldly, “I have a water bottle in my backpack, I need you to stop holding me so tight so I can pull it out.”

The restraints on him tightened a fraction.

“Are you done receiving my aftercare?” The voice asked more tentatively, “Have I calmed you down from an emotional overload? You were shaking when I caught you. For a second, I thought your heart stopped.”

There was a vulnerability to its tone. Almost scared. Scared of…what? Of Sol?

“I’m calm now.” Sol tested, and forced the corners of his mouth to lift. 

The seatbelt clicked in its release then clicked back into place again.

“Technically, I’m suppose to keep a passenger restrained at all times.”

“You can trust me.” Sol tried softly as if coaxing a small puppy, “Besides, your reflexes are better than all these other cars right? You saved me right? You wouldn’t hit anything with me sitting inside you…” Sol’s tone trailed off as if hurt. “Would you?”

The car went silent for awhile, and Sol continued to track their location mentally through their street light illuminated route. 

“Just a drink?” The car finally asked. “You won’t spill or leak? No tools?”

“No tools.” Sol promised. “I just need to reach my backpack.”

The seatbelt unfastened, creeping away across his torso, and the one across his helmet retracted.

“What about my feet?”

Sol’s heart rate spiked as the cables around the ankles of his rollerblades wrapped tighter and coiled up higher.

“Why do you need your feet to take in water?” A revulsion had entered the tone of the voice.

Perfect.

“Because if I don’t, I might leak on your -”

The cables retracted almost faster than Sol could process, and his fake grin turned genuine. 

“Thanks.” Slowly shouldering off his backpack Sol quickly tied his boot laces to a strap, then pulled on the toggle of the zipper. A cable shot out and hovered, seemingly curious, and Sol paused.

“Why do you have so many cylinders containing acetone, xylene, and toluene? Is that why you were backfiring in my back seat? Those chemicals are not good for your respiratory or central nervous systems. I will not permit you to consume that.”

The cable’s poked at Sol’s backpack - for emphasis? In threat? Sol narrowed his eyes at it then slipped his left hand inside while his right drifted to an outside pocket.

“Of course not.” His right hand grasped around familiar smooth metal, while his left popped off a lid. “There’s water in here, I just have to dig for it.”

He stalled, mentally counting out the streets he needed. 

“What do you do with the cylinders of pigment and chemicals under pressure?”

Heart rate increasing, Sol gave the same smile he’d given the teenagers on the ferry as he flicked on his lighter in his right hand.

“You really want to know?”

~8~8~8~8~8~8~

“No casualties, but we got thirty seven people enroute to hospitals.”

The red and blue flashing of emergency vehicles and construction flood lights backlit Will Lennox as he jogged between Optimus Prime’s passenger door and Ironhide. The chopping beat of five helicopters stirred through the night air. The only tell from Optimus’ relief was from the soft hiss of his air breaks. 

“And the condition of the two people who were in the white SUV?” He asked.

Will Lennox looked toward the wreckage where Robert Epps was cooridinating NEST troops to render aid and transport, and grimaced. 

A white SUV lay splayed in half. Sliced clean. Two halves that momentum had drifted apart on opposite sides of the road. They lay on their sides, respective passenger compartments facing toward the sky. Empty now, where once there were two delicate passengers inside. Human safety airbags had deployed, and dried smears of a human’s life blood indicated facial impact. Combustable internal fluids that had dripped, smoked and seeped from the vehicle were being tended to by emergency workers.

An assortment of cars, trucks and SUVs lay haphazard through the clogged and barricaded street at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Bystanders filming and taking photos. One SUV had rolled. 

The air smelled vaguely of the burnt circuits and spilled fluid. Chunks of plastic headlight covers, bumpers hanging off, shattered glass littered the roadway; an unfortunate familiar sight. Though these cars couldn’t feel, the humans who used them for armored rapid transportation were sentient on a level parallel to Optimus’ own race. 

Technologically and sociologically isolated by their lack of ability to traverse the deep recesses of space, humans were at times extremely narrow minded and short thinking. As a species, they were very young, but the potential for greatness was there among them. They were evolving faster sociologically now than ever before. Still, first contact with organics was always a delicate matter. 

And Sideswipe was drawing thin Optimus’ ever stretching tolerance with his behaviour.

A trust Optimus had been carefully cultivating between his Autobots and Earth’s leaders potentially lay in the shambles of this wreckage. 

The humans government of this nation hardly considered Mission City a victory. They did not yet understand the full scope of the tempting combination of resources their system contained.

Nor were they prepared to understand how alien Cybertronians truly were to them. 

“Bystanders rushed to their aid. Airbags went off and the two halves were on fire. The passenger had been holding a pencil it -“ Will Lennox shook his head, “it wasn’t pretty.”

::The pencil punctured through the human’s cheek, narrowly avoiding the eye.:: Ratchet added over their private short wave communications. ::Their epidermis layer experienced burns, and their faces were swelling and bleeding from the impact of their impact safety devices.::

::I told you Sideswipe wasn’t ready to leave the base Optimus.:: Ironhide added as he opened his driver side door for the Major, ::Annabelle still confused him.::

::He stormed around for a week after he hit that rabbit.:: Ratchet reminded. ::I was talking to Jolt. He has gotten worse.::

::I am well aware of Jolt’s reports on Sideswipe’s behaviour since we last saw him.::

::Don’t judge him too harshly Optimus.:: Ironhide added, ::I should have never let him get separated from me on Tyger Pax.::

::You had no choice Ironhide, Bumblebee -::

“Do you have any idea what he was after?” Will Lennox interrupted Optimus. oblivious to the communications they kept hidden from him, “I’ve got the Pentagon breathing down my neck for answers. You guys already make a lot of the higher ups nervous. One of your own going on a joyride-rampage through New York? Optimus I can’t have your back if he kills someone.”

“It is possible Sideswipe detected a Decepticon similar to the one who attacked Sam at his school, and pursued it.” Optimus dearly hoped that was the case.

“The giant metal bird we passed off as a gas leak hallucination?” Will Lennox gave Optimus a flat stare.

“That is one description for Laserbeak’s structure and appearance.” Optimus deflected. 

“Laserbeak huh?” Will got into Ironhide’s cab, and Optimus left his passenger window down to give an open visual conversational signal for the human to focus on. “By your tone Big Guy, that sounds bad.”

“It’s not Laserbeak specifically that’s the problem.” Ironhide rumbled, “It is who Laserbeak always travels with.”

::You think Soundwave’s made landfall yet?:: Ratchet asked.

::No.:: Optimus answered, ::Soundwave is meticulous and patient. He is either still in orbit absorbing information through the human’s communications systems, or on a ship hidden within the system.::

::He could be as far away as Saturn and still be in the human’s network Optimus, their technology is coded full of holes and it was reverse engineered from Megatron’s systems. Their coding -:: 

::I am well aware of the security risk their coding presents.:: Optimus simultaneously responded while answering Lennox.

“Since we were already converging on Sam’s school to investigate Sideswipe’s radio silence, Laserbeak’s attack on Sam was thwarted, but based on that evidence it is likely Sideswipe was after one of Laserbeak’s…siblings.”

The hesitation from Optimus as he chose the translation they had settled on would have spoken volumes to a Cybertronian, but to Will Lennox it would be barely existent.

“I still can’t believe you guys have siblings but no parents.” Will shook his head as he dialed for his superior officer. 

::Are you going to explain Soundwave and his symbiotes or should I?:: Ratchet prompted.

::I think it’s best to wait until it is relevant.:: 

::Choosing the translation of the terms “twin” and “triplet” to describe Skids and Mudflap’s branched sparks, and Arcee probably wasn’t my finest hour.:: Ironhide muttered, ::I was trying to put it in terms they’d understand.::

::It’s alright Ironhide.:: Optimus pulsed his EM field lightly, ::It serves to make us relatable to them for the time being. We will clear up any issues in the future when Sam is fully qualified to serve as our diplomat and can better advise us on the nuances.::

::Four _years_ Optimus:: Ironhide complained, ::How humans learn is so inefficient. Can’t Ratchet figure out a way to download -::

::No.:: Ratchet interrupted, ::Stop asking me that. The risk to Sam’s long term function is unknown. He’s giving me enough trouble as it is.::

::How is Sam?:: Optimus asked.

::Unhappy in the back of my cab but stable. I need to get him back to my Repair Bay in Nevada.::

::Unfortunately with Laserbeak spotted in the area, you will have to wait until we can all travel together. Even with Jolt’s arrival, I can not risk your loss Ratchet, or Sam's.::

::We need an easier way to move around this planet Optimus.:: Ironhide warned not for the first time, ::It took us fifty minutes to get here bypassing that clog Sideswipe created in the tunnel. We can’t keep waiting for their military to ferry us around. And we can’t all parachute into a city every time. If Demolisher had had air support in Shanghai -::

::You aren’t seriously proposing we introduce the humans to ground bridge technology!:: The disbelieving edge of Ratchet’s voice hissed through Optimus’ systems ::By the All Spark Ironhide, the humans still have _boarders_ on their planet. They’d destroy themselves.::

::Then we build it somewhere they don’t know about. We’re trying to help them. It’s for their own good.::

::Their own good? Where would you get the power source for a ground bridge without trade Ironhide. We are refugees on this planet -::

::We’re allies.::

Ironhide and Ratchet continued to bicker over their short wave communications. Optimus locked his visual sensors on the two halves of the white SUV while he waited for intel from either Glen Whitmann or Bumblebee pertaining to Sideswipe’s current coordinates.

One question pushed its way to the forefront of Optimus’ tactical net above the rest. 

Who _had_ Sideswipe been after? 

And unease had settled in all of their lines from the moment they noticed Sideswipe had blocked his communications and gone dark. Ironhide and Ratchet at been setting each other’s circuits on edge. Snapping at each other, avoiding the topic taking precedence within their processor. 

Only Jolt had had the bearings to verbally acknowledge what they were all calculating: 

Sideswipe had finally snapped. 

Sideswipe had always been overly aggressive and irritated at small slights from the company of others. Cybertronians were a social species but Sideswipe seemed to simultaneously distain company yet insist on injecting himself into the circles of others. Prone to fits of violent explosive anger, and with little to no patience, he was hopeless on a team. He took directions and twisted them to his own advantage. Optimus, Ultra Magnus and Prowl had had no choice but to simply assign him to the frontlines, and hope for the best.

Ironhide attempted to reign him in with moderate success.

Twitchy: the only description Ratchet had been able to squeeze out of Sideswipe to describe what set him off. 

Spark Stunted: the official diagnosis Ratchet had given when they wrangled the new build off the battlefield and into the Medbay.

Feral, glitch, defective had been the less kind descriptions tossed as a label on Sideswipe from among their ranks. 

They had been pumping out new sparks too fast from the cube to replace their dwindling numbers. Sideswipe’s spark had never fully formed, its growth rate stunted before it was released into the pod containing his frame. 

The guilt of his responsibility toward Sideswipe, Optimus Prime had become accustom to living with, but he was running out of his ability to absolve Sideswipe of his behaviour. There was too much at risk on this planet.

Running a numerical simulation, Optimus back tracked the trajectory of the two halves of that SUV. There was some small glimmer of relief that it appeared Sideswipe had at least attempted to minimize collateral damage in his attack. He had sliced clean down the middle but there was no other indication of frontal damage. He had been transformed or partially transformed then, spinning up over the SUV based on the locations of the collision wreckage of the other automobiles. 

Potentially fleeing from the consequences of his actions.

But no. Some of the trajectories of the wreckage did not make sense. Some force had sent them off course. Nudged them a little here or there and -

Optimus focused his sensors on the SUV that was sitting with its wheels up in the air. 

There. Optimus enhanced his visual sensors. A small dent, cylindrical in shape on the passenger door. Sideswipe had at least made an attempt then, to minimize casualties.

Working up a three dimensional model for the humans of his projected analysis of Sideswipe’s motion through the crash, he finally received a notification of an incoming call. 

::Glen Whitmann.:: Optimus greeted.

::Maggie actually.:: An Australian accented voice greeted back, ::Glen’s busy hyperventilating into a paper bag while trying to send you new footage and simultaneously running facial recognition software.::

::BLOOD! HE HAS FUCKING BLOOD ALL OVER HIS HOOD!:: The voice of Glen Whitmann screamed in the background.

::We have footage of him from a security camera at New York City Hall cutting through a park full of people and Prime, you are going to want to see this.::

A video file was uploaded. Accessing the video, it started with static then cleared and Optimus suppressed a rev of irritation. That was clearly Sideswipe. Cutting through a park. Hot condensation trailing out his hood in his fury, chasing after a specific human on…wheels? The human spun and hurled a garbage can toward Sideswipe. Organic bits of wadded paper stuck to the bright red sprays of fluid on his hood.

Optimus compared it to the blood on the ground around him, and sent the video to Ratchet to analyze to see if the spray pattern could in any way have come from a human. 

::That is not acting like a car.:: Maggie added as Glen screamed about Sideswipe going on a murderous rampage in the background. ::I doubled back from his location, and found this.::

A secondary video was received and Optimus examined it four times in less than half a second. Sideswipe chased a human on wheels then stopped at a barrier, waited then peeled out up the shoreline.

::As you can see sir, Sideswipe’s been after this _specific_ person since the Paulus Hook Ferry Terminal, right before he started disrupting traffic systems in a one mile radius around him. Who knows how far or how long he has chased him. He didn’t appear on our radar until he started manipulating stop lights.:: 

Optimus brought up the recording from the New York City Hall and enhanced the a frozen frame of the human Sideswipe pursued. His face was contorted in a snarl, strange red pointed teeth set on black.

::Have you found the identity of this human?::

::We’re still checking sir -::

::He’s a fucking ghost! He doesn’t exist!:: 

::Not leaving a digital footprint across social media or the banking system is a personal insult to Glen.:: Maggie Madison offered by way of explanation of Glen in the background.

::Anything else?:: Spark rate increasing, and humans still performing triage on the street, Optimus almost hesitated to ask.

::We just found a tweet complaining about a suicidal rollerblader flying down the center of the pedestrian walkway as if hellhounds were on his heels.::

Optimus didn’t precisely understand the majority of the human expressions Maggie Madison had just used but he understood the summary of her conclusion. 

::Any update on Sideswipe’s current location?::

::Uh that’s the thing:: Glen Witmann’s voice pressed against the receiver, ::See I have this image recognition software, and it’s brilliant. World class. Nothing can touch it but -::

::But?: Optimus prompted.

::But Sideswipe’s silver chrome finish reflects streetlights at night. That, and the ketchup on his hood is disrupting my recognition analytics. My software can’t pick him up.::

::Keep trying.:: Optimus opted for neutrality of his tone then forwarded the information to Ratchet, Ironhide, and Bumblebee in a datapacket. Ironhide would inform Will Lennox of the situation. 

Bumblebee sent a single ping of confirmation that he received the packet. Two seconds later, Bumblebee informed Optimus that was indeed a human in the video, he was simply wearing a mouthguard, then inquired about Sam. Bumblebee’s communications were short and to the point. There was an anger there, a fury that his charge and friend had been placed at risk by Sideswipe’s inability to meter or control himself. Optimus reminded Bumblebee of his order not to engage Sideswipe unless necessary, and only report his location when found.

Out of all the Autobots, Bumblebee had always set off Sideswipe’s anger the most explosively. 

::Perhaps that’s the purging human he asked about and it purged on him.:: Ratchet offered gently.

::That’s not an excuse.:: Ironhide snapped.

::I’m not saying it’s an excuse:: Ratchet snapped right back, ::But it is an explanation.::

::When has Sideswipe ever needed a reason to go off on someone.::

Silence sat heavily, all of them pointedly avoided verbalizing the truth in greater detail. The unspoken statement that Sideswipe never appeared to need a reason to be cruel, that he seemed to relish in it, lay unspoken between them.

::That garbage can hit him.:: Ironhide’s observation only brought further confusion. ::I’ve been shooting at that mech to teach him some Primus damned concept of self preservation since he tore out of his pod and straight into the battlefield. He isn’t an easy target Optimus, and he’s an arrogant aft about it. There is no way he’d let that garbage can tossed by a human make it past his sensor network and not open fire.::

Silence fell between them again and Optimus forwarded his three dimensional simulation to Lennox’s phone to submit to his superiors. 

::At the risk of sounding like one of Optimus’ cliches -:: Ratchet muttered with no inflection.

::Don’t you fragging dare.:: Ironhide warned, but Ratchet’s EM field pulsed out against them and ignored Ironhide completely, only pausing for a full spark rotation for dramatic effect.

::I think there is more going on here with Sideswipe, than meets the eye.::

Ironhide groaned into their comms and if Optimus was in his root mode, he would have snapped his mouthplate shut to hide his grin. 

As it was, a slight puff huffed out of his vents as he gave Ratchet the equivalent of a shoulder punch with his EM field.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> >:3


	10. Guardian Demon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *LE GASP AN UPDATE*
> 
> Someday I'll learn proper grammar and punctuation rules, until that day you have Atsadi to thank. Because of them you aren't reading an overwhelming amount of semi-colons, comma splices, and half sentences.

For once in his life, Sideswipe took a ventilation in an effort to calm his systems like Ratchet always suggested. 

He had taken refuge along the waterfront in an abandoned building; one that reminded him eerily of his home planet. The gentle pings and ticking of metal accompanying the cooling of his systems echoed off the walls of the hollowed-out building sheltering him. It stank: musty old grease, smoke, and decaying metal. The fine grit and grime of the dark, sedimentary carbon-based rocks piled and strewn across the concrete floor wedged up deep into the treads of his tires. 

To say that the building wasn’t the most structurally sound was an understatement, but it was out of the way and the windows had been all boarded over. Sideswipe’s low-light scanners collected the thin slivers of available light coming in from the street lamps, and created a clear image of the inside of the building. Exposed steel pipes and beams spanned four stories of the central room. Layers of oxidized metal in various shades of orange decay had him parked in the dead center of the room. Nonsensical human glyphs adorned the crumbling walls between the beams. His infrared showed no occupants upon the network of dilapidated walkways leading off to smaller human-sized halls and rooms. Primitive pressure gauges lined a stretch of wall to his left. Fine particles floated through the beams of his headlights, settling from his forced arrival through the barricaded entranceway. His lights illuminated the space in front of him, including the central pit in the floor dropping down two stories toward broken-down machinery half-submerged in reservoirs of rust-saturated water. The red glow of his tail lights would be visible to anyone who walked around the building.

Despite the risk that his lights would attract unwanted attention from the outside, Sideswipe left them active as a courtesy so his human could see too.

Not that his tensed human pet was looking at anything but the grimy ground in his position.

Taking a ventilation - or ten - did little to resolve the silent standoff between them. 

It was fine though. It could have been worse. Sideswipe still had his pet human. His human didn’t go smoosh and -

He drew in another ventilation, filters capturing the tiny mineral particles in the air.

He could feel his pet’s thin, cold fleshie digits grabbing tight against his kick plate. It was indescribably creepy to _feel_ the harder skeletal structure of his pet encased in what accounted to a flesh bag of microorganisms and goo.

His battle pet certainly had warrior coding, though. Even after Sideswipe had blown out the flame in his pet’s hand with a targeted burst of his vents, Sunshine still managed to keep his fragging chemicals lit with an applied pressure. He had pulled out a second canister, intending to ignite it off the first. As soon as Sideswipe had rolled down his window to vent his cab, his slimy human had been halfway out the window, fearless of the traffic that had surrounded them. Sideswipe had cut through an alley, balanced on two wheels on his driver’s side to try and shake his pet back inside. That had only allowed his clever pet to grab the underside of Sideswipe’s frame for leverage. After screaming, scolding, honking, and barking out commands for miles with no effect, Sideswipe had found a quiet, secluded corner of Brooklyn’s Sunset District to lay low and reassess his approach. 

Because Sideswipe had this situation under control. He swore he had this under control. He _had_ to have this under control. 

He was a responsible pet owner who had done his research.

Clearly though, he had missed some important variable, some prerequisite to trust beyond what he could offer his pet. 

The first hour of pet ownership was not working out at all how he had predicted in his simulations. 

Said pet was currently halfway out his passenger window, fleshie fingers of one hand gripped tight to the underside of Sideswipe’s frame and refusing to come all the way back inside. His flimsy cloth-covered aft stuck ominously straight up in the air, pointed like a loaded weapon at Sideswipe’s steering wheel. Sideswipe wasn’t certain which was worse: having that fleshie aft, that could burst at any moment, pointed in his direction…

Or the literal weapon his battle pet had resting against a major energon line.

Sideswipe had never predicted that as soon as he came to a stop, his battle pet would retrieve a knife from a pocket in his cloth subspace. He had so many odd bits and cylinders of chemicals, metal, and organic pulp in there, Sideswipe had thought it was one of the human’s fuel consumption tools. No one had told him humans had spring-powered blades. He definitely hadn’t predicted that his greasy, fleshie hand could reach in past his under plating armor and target the major energon line leading to his wheel, without setting off his self-defense protocols.

Of course he had, though, because he was _Sideswipe’s_ very scary human.

Unfortunately, they had been locked in this stalemate between them for the past seventeen minutes. 

Currently, Sideswipe was scanning the datanet and simultaneously asking the other human pet owners on his forums for help. Apparently he had been too careless by chasing after trust first. He had missed an important and ominous step:

Honest and clear communication. 

He was supposed to express his wants, needs, and won’ts and have his little Sunshine do the same. 

Well that was just slagging Prime. He wasn’t able to be completely honest because his human still didn’t have clearance.

Now some of the humans on the datanet were typing in uppercase letters at him that if he couldn’t handle total honesty then he couldn’t have a human pet! Other humans’ advice was worse though: Sideswipe had already told them he didn’t want to hurt his little Sunshine, and he liked him feisty. In an impulsive act of petty frustration towards that forum pack of humans, who were insisting Sideswipe was being a ‘beta male’, Sideswipe deleted all their account data and infected their console hard drives to show them who was now the dominant species on this planet.

Through it all, he kept a tight hold of his pet and continued his internal mantra:

_Don’t pop, don’t leak, don’t pop, don’t leak, don’t pop, don’t leak..._

Everything was clamped down tight to his frame as he coiled all four of his sensory cables tighter on his pet human. One wrapped around his ankles to stop him from lashing out again with his wheels against Sideswipe’s internal communications systems. Two were wrapped around his pet’s thighs as an anchor; the final cable gripped tight around his midsection for stability.

Sunshine’s cloth coverings had slid up his chest as his upper body hung out Sideswipe’s windows. His cloth subspace rested next to where his helmeted head hovered a few inches above the ground, as did his metal ignition source. 

_Ew. Touching._ The sensitive filament tips of Sideswipe’s cables he kept spiked straight up at ninety degrees from his human’s back. _Ew. I’m touching him and it’s so wet, lumpy, and -_

UGH! What if the little trail of hair on his stomach got trapped in one of Sideswipe’s cable segments? 

_EW EW EW I’d have to pick it out!_

And weren’t humans supposed to have smooth skin on their backs? Not smooth plating like any sensible sentient being, but relatively smooth if Sideswipe discounted the way their subdermal contracting protein filaments rippled and shifted under their subcutaneous tissue. Between the human datanet and the base, Sideswipe had seen enough backs of humans to know they should be smooth. Sideswipe mostly ignored the humans on the base, but he watched the soldiers spar, morbidly unable to look away. 

He kept waiting for them to pop each other on the mats. 

Even though Sideswipe could disarm his human simply by crushing his torso, he couldn’t force his human back in to talk to him by pulling him, that much was obvious. Graphic predictions of how he’d burst apart if Sideswipe pulled too hard filled his processor. His ball-socketed shoulders and their thin sinuous ligaments would dislocate first. Would the sound be like a wet suction or like the snap of a branch under a wheel? That thought made the dampeners under Sideswipe’s plating crawl. Then skin would rupture, or maybe his soft internal components would burst. It’d seep down into Sideswipe’s seats: down his window frame, _into_ his door panel and -

_Going to rip you in two._

The pulse was so sudden, so vicious and absolute, that it lit up a new pathway in Sideswipe’s cortex. Its hot acidic intensity racing through his systems launched his spark against its casing. His spark rate skyrocketed with the pulse: racing to match the rapid contractions of his pet human’s heartbeat. Each rapid beat could be _felt_ through the living metal of his sensory cables. 

The unbidden thought warred against his tight yet delicate hold of soft, moist flesh so that, for a nanosecond, Sideswipe almost released him to prove that he’d never rip his human in two. But each synced vibration between them thrummed a confusing and indescribable relief on the ache in Sideswipe’s spark. 

Sideswipe coiled his cables tighter in hopes to keep his human activated.

He had him still. He hadn’t gone squish. His heart hadn’t stopped this time. 

Then the pulses faded, and his human’s voice pitch matched the vicious acid Sideswipe strangely longed to feel again in his spark. 

“If you move that fucking thing another inch,” The blade in his fleshie hand pressed a touch harder. “I’m slicing your brake line.”

Brake lines? Sideswipe didn’t have -

His blade was against - 

Oh. Right. His human didn’t know. His human _couldn’t_ know. 

Sideswipe emitted a low frequency scream of frustration outside his human’s range of hearing. The rush of air out his vents from his silent aching frustration sent the black rocks of carbon scattering away from his immediate area in a perfect circle. His human began to backfire from the cloud of dust kicked up in the air.

“Whatever the fuck you just did,” his human choked out, with a hot, moist breath against Sideswipe’s door panel, “don’t do it again.”

Fine. Communication. _Mostly_ honest communication. Sideswipe could do that.

“You made,” Sideswipe’s voice cracked out of his speakers, “a fragging flamethrower.” 

“I thought you were done screaming like a baby about that,” his salty sun-spark snapped back. “My ears were ringing for blocks.”

In less than a nanosecond, Sideswipe did a quick video search on his pet’s simile so he could process the audio, make a comparison and snap out a retort in his own defense.

_Ew._

‘Babies’ were the vile mini human frame-types. They leaked even worse than Sideswipe’s pet’s frame-type. Their nasal cavities dripped a constant stream of ooze when they screamed, and their heads and eyes were morbidly mal-proportioned compared to the rest of their body. Eugh.

He couldn’t keep the shudder from his system as he heard their Terrorcon-like shrieks and wails while processing video file after video file of their leaky faces. 

And that was just his commentary on their faces…

Oh Primus, Sideswipe _had_ shrieked like one of those putrid mini-humans.

Okay. Fine. Whatever. He took another calming ventilation.

Clear communication. Honesty led to trust which lead to activation, right? He had to do this. 

“I don’t like flamethrowers,” Sideswipe grit out his speaker. “I don’t _want_ to be burned alive from the inside. I _need_ you to never do that again. I _won’t_ allow it.”

As the cone of hot flame had shot toward his steering wheel, Sideswipe had been expecting a hot incendiary gel to stick to his seats and spread.

In Sideswipe’s experience, Decepticon engineers and their weapons were the fragging worst.

Sunshine squirmed, dropping slightly in Sideswipe’s hold. His pet’s outer cloth layer on his legs drooped over his round, gluteus aft. Only a thinner and even more permeable underlayer remained as the flimsy barrier of Sideswipe’s salvation.

Scratch that. 

Trying to be a responsible pet owner and making sure his pet didn’t suffocate from ignited toxic fumes, only to have said pet make a dash out the window Sideswipe had opened _for his benefit_ was the worst. Having that aft pointed inside him was almost worse than having energon boiled in his lines. 

Sunshine didn’t respond, but he kept his blade against Sideswipe’s energon line as he let go with his other hand. He dragged his finger across the dimly illuminated ground, then brought it up toward his -

“Sunshine, no!” Sideswipe commanded. “Bad. I don’t want you to eat that.”

“I’m just cleaning off my finger,” His human responded defensively, then spit oral fluid on the ground and gripped back to the underside of Sideswipe’s frame. “And stop calling me Sunshine.”

“Why are you so gross all the time?” Sideswipe snapped.

“If you don’t like it, let me go.” He snapped right back.

“No.” He couldn’t help but grip tighter. His human’s heart rate jumped.

“What the fuck did I say about moving those things?” his pet hissed.

Sideswipe released some pressure from his pneumatic lines. His pet flinched and twisted up the blade.

Obviously, when Sideswipe got his pet trained, they’d be unstoppable. He couldn’t wait to rub his Sunshine in Bumblebee’s face. Maybe Sunshine would even punch Sam’s face in for Sideswipe. It was going to be great. 

It was going to be _perfect_.

But - sharp metal jabbed harder under Sideswipe’s frame - couldn’t his pet be a little _less_ fearless when Sideswipe could just move his wheel and crush his hand? 

“Okay, so do you _want_ me not to move them?” Sideswipe asked in an effort to foster the communication his fellow _responsible_ owners recommended. “ _Need_ me not to move them, or _won’t_ ever let me move them?” 

“I can’t believe this shit,” his pet muttered.

Frustration burned in Sideswipe’s spark; betrayal fought against his thin tolerance and erupted. 

“I’m _trying_ to be clear.” He snapped at his pet out of his speakers. “I’m being patient with you. You told me to _trust_ you, and then you tried to light me on fire.” 

“I _lied_.” Sunshine wiggled again, testing his restraints, his cloth covering slipping further down his hips. “So sue me.” 

He gained another inch, and stabbed deeper under Sideswipe’s frame.

“Stop it.” Sideswipe tried growling as he did another search for battle pet commands. “Aus! Pfui!” 

Sunshine didn’t stop sawing in the gap between Sideswipe’s underbody shield and his front wheel.

“Sunshine!” Sideswipe tried to command his attention. “Stop trying to stab me.” 

No matter how much Sideswipe looked, he couldn’t find the command for no-stabbing. Sunshine clearly didn’t understand drop-it, leave-it, _aus_ , or _pfui!_.

Thanks for nothing, Schutzhund Training Commands forum. Sideswipe left a scathing comment while he scanned his human’s cloth subspace again.

“Then let’s make this clear!” The knife jammed up the seam and dented in Sideswipe line, making him wince. “I’m not your fucking pet. You are not wrapping me in cellophane and I’m not letting Satan’s Glitching Concept Corvette of Nightmares shove anything up my ass.” 

“Then I _need_ you keep control of your fluids, especially your _ass_ ,” Sideswipe snapped right back.

“Then you keep,” Sol grunted as he tried to leverage the knife. “Your slimy.” Torque. “Demonic tentacles.” Shimmy and twist. “Away from my ass!” 

Sideswipe clamped his plating over the flimsy knife and pinned it in his frame, narrowly missing his pet’s thin fingers.

“Slimy?” Sideswipe repeated, affronted as his pet’s thermoregulation oozed from his back onto Sideswipe’s sensory cables. “SLIMY? Out of the two of us, one of us is all dripping wet and moist on the outside and inside and it’s not me.”

Shifting his plating, Sideswipe pinched his pet’s knife until the metal heated as he stressed the bonds holding it together. It fractured with a loud pop. His human jumped, then shimmied his hand out of Sideswipe’s wheel well and stared blankly at his broken-off blade.

“And I’m not a sharktopus,” Sideswipe muttered irritably. He coiled the end of one of his cables and tried to soothe his pet by stroking down his lumpy back. “I don’t have _tentacles_ and I have no interest in your ass. I just want to weld it shut is all.” 

As soon as the tip of Sideswipe's cable pet against the strange puckered welts and sunken glyphs on his skin, his pet went completely rigid and still in Sideswipe’s hold. An uncontrollable _panic_ raced through Sideswipe’s spark. Immediately Sideswipe generated series of targeted radio waves to scan his pet’s health. He wasn’t moving, his respiration had stopped, but his heart rate had spiked, and his muscles were trembling. 

“Sunshine?” Sideswipe’s spark was racing too. “It’s okay. I _won’t_ weld it shut. I know you _need_ it. Sunshine? My little Sunshine?” 

He hadn’t - no he couldn’t have killed him. Just the thought of - 

“My name is _SOL_.” His pet raged and tried to kick his legs, ineffectually trying to twist up from his core and attack like a loose live wire. “Not Sunshine, you fucking Satan spawn!”

He twisted and turned in Sideswipe’s grasp, fleshie optics unfocused and wild. Indiscriminately, he began stabbing his broken knife against Sideswipe’s armored plating. 

Sideswipe sunk down on his shocks. His movement only served to further enrage his pet.

“Stop moving, you stupid possessed car,” He moved on to trying to puncture Sideswipe’s front tire. “I’ll fucking kill you.” 

Sideswipe vented a gust of air out of his vents. His human’s fleshie systems were trembling in Sideswipe’s grasp. His tiny human heart was racing so hard with his exertion Sideswipe feared it might stop again. 

No matter what Sideswipe did to try to calm him, Sideswipe’s human wouldn’t listen. His heart had stopped before in this state - Sideswipe swore his heart had stopped in the seconds it took to reach him on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sideswipe had… he had never moved like _that_ before. Every sensor, every nerve cluster, every system had activated with that single intense pulse his pet had screamed out toward him.

Searching frantically for a solution through the databanks where he stored his research he grasped on the only thing he could. 

Blanket! Sideswipe needed a blanket! 

He didn’t have a blanket. 

Water? 

The only water here was rancid. 

Needs? 

What did his pet need?

Communicate.

“Okay, okay. _Sol_.” Sideswipe tried to soothe and tend to his pet’s needs. “It’s okay. Are you hungry? So you don’t get poisoned again, I’ll find something fresh for you to kill and you can feast upon its flesh, then -”

His poor defective human threw his broken knife to the ground, grabbed his helmeted head, emitted a muffled scream, and covered his inefficient audial receptors. 

“SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” He screamed. “You creepy deranged tuna can! Just stop. Talking. I should be dead. Am I dead? Why didn’t that SUV hit me? Maybe I’m in a coma. I’m not going to wake up to red running into water. I refuse. I tap out of dealing with this fucking shit.”

His breath came in short gasps while Sideswipe was already researching what a tuna can was.

“I don’t look anything like a tuna can.” Sideswipe answered cautiously. Was his human’s visual feed not optimal? “And you are NOT storing your disgusting aquatic craniate mackerel fuel inside of me. That is a hard won’t.” 

He added the last bit for good measure: best to start off with boundaries and rules, but his pet didn’t seem to hear him. Instead Sideswipe’s human kept going, his voice raising in pitch.

“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS UP WITH YOUR FREAKY TENTACLE BUSINESS?” He thrashed and tried to kick his legs, working the outer layer on his legs down further. “THAT SHIT IS JUST NOT OKAY! YOU CAN’T JUST WRAP PEOPLE UP AND SHOVE STUFF UP - WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG YOU? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MY BRAIN?”

An instant. A pulse. A pulse of unrestrained terror locked and spiraled in Sideswipe’s spark.

What… 

What _was_ wrong with his fleshie’s brain?

What _was_ wrong with his fleshie’s brain?

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR BRAIN?” Sideswipe bellowed as he scanned his human’s brain.

“YOU!” His human frothed. “You are what is wrong with my brain! You talk like a deranged therapist. You called me your Little Sunshine - only my mother ever called - I can't believe I'm still talking - ”

“YOU NEED YOUR BRAIN!” Sideswipe was pretty sure Ratchet said humans really needed that.

“You think?” Sol snapped, his heart rate starting to slow.

But Sideswipe barely registered the change. He was lost in a panicked keyword search frenzy on the datanet.

“YES.” Sideswipe screamed. “YOU NEED IT TO THINK! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR BRAIN? I’LL FIX -”

“I DON’T KNOW!” his human cried. Sideswipe searched faster, tearing through WebMD’s database and every pet forum he could find. The stupid human datanet sites became like shifting through mud the more rapid fire inquiries he made. His human’s words were starting to slow and slur, voice getting weaker. “I’m losing my vision. I can't see… what are you doing to me?”

_No no no no no no no._

“IT’S NOT ME! I’M CHECKING, I’M CHECKING!” Frag, there was so much that could go wrong with a human’s brain. Faster faster faster faster, every second and eternity more alone. No inflammation, no infections, no parasites, no - “SUNSHINE YOU HAVE TO TELL ME MORE. WHAT ARE YOUR SYMPTOMS I -”

Then his human just…

Went limp.

His respiration was ragged with a slight wheeze, but he just lay there: hanging loose and dangling out of Sideswipe’s window.

Sideswipe recoiled his cable from around his human’s waist. His human flopped further down and bounced slightly against his door. His cable’s sensitive receptors hovered inches over his human’s exposed back. Words, shapes, and lines. His human had words, shapes, and lines decorating his back. The lumps on his skin. Frantically, Sideswipe flooded the human pet messages boards with questions and keyword searches. 

“… Sol?” He couldn’t bring himself to touch him, lest he hurt him more. “My Left-Handed Salty Sunspark of the Earth?”

The short wait for an online response from a human and not a database was agonizing. 

When he found his answer, the complex wave of emotions rushing through his spark left him with no words to describe what he felt. 

Being hung upside down for twenty three minutes wasn’t good for a human without training. His internal fleshie components were pressing up against his _lungs_. Apparently those were meant to sit on top of the other components for a reason. 

There was even a word for it: asphyxiation.

Sideswipe almost dropped him then.

But according to instructions and safety when it came to tying up human pets, being dropped from a few inches above the ground could paralyze his delicate fleshie frame. 

And Ratchet… could Ratchet even weld flesh back together? His back. His back looked like someone had welded his flesh back together more than once. Did his human - did they cause his human pain? Sideswipe had touched one… one of the malformed triangles. 

Gently, he lowered his human’s limp body to the ground. Carefully, he pulled down his shirt. Once his human’s head, neck, and shoulders were on the ground, Sideswipe recalled his cables back into his cab and he activated his comms. 

:: _RATCHET!_ :: Sideswipe keened into the comm line.

But his sensors almost exploded when his human didn’t flop to the ground but instead pressed his hands to the concrete and rolled with the momentum in a somersault. In a fluid movement Sol yanked up his cloth coverings, grabbed his backpack and lighter, then spun on his wheels to face Sideswipe. His eyes flashed in triumph as he grinned.

::Sideswipe, where the-:: Sideswipe cut his comms as he locked all his sensors on his baffling human.

“You are really bad at this, aren’t you? Why do I get the feeling I could sell you a bridge?” Sol rolled backward to the edge of the cleared circle of debris around Sideswipe. “You sound like you are reading a manual. Am I your first contract?”

He crouched and leapt up to grab a rusted-out ladder. It groaned and swayed under his weight as he pulled himself up anyway on his shaking limbs. 

In a flurry of shifting and spinning metal, Sideswipe transformed and reached for him.

“Don’t touch me.” His human’s stare was so intense, Sideswipe couldn’t bring himself to grab him.

Did the welds on his back hurt to be touched?

The gravel crunched under Sideswipe’s wheels as he rolled underneath the platform, ready to catch his human as he climbed up to the third story walkway. He was careful to point his headlights on his chest so his human could see the next rung.

“Sol. That’s dangerous.” The walkway swayed under his every movement, and bolts were missing from some of the supports. “Come.”

“No.” His human grabbed the top railing and swung his wheels onto the walkway, then turned and rolled backward with his hand in his pocket. “You seem oddly concerned about me. What are you? My guardian demon or something?”

Sideswipe searched the term. Guardian demons it seemed were highly dangerous and nearly impossible to control. Yet they would fiercely guard and protect those they attached to… 

Sideswipe was a human pet guardian like Bumblebee - once he got clearance - 

No, he would be _better_ than Bumblebee. 

“… Yes?“ Guardian demon was close enough to describe Sideswipe’s relationship to his human.

“You don’t seem certain.” Sol’s facial expression indicated he was unimpressed.

Well Sideswipe couldn’t tell him the truth. He was supposed to be blending in, and apparently Sol’s fleshie brain might explode if Sideswipe told him he was an alien. Or something. Slag, Sideswipe really wished he had paid more attention; he didn’t want to risk making his human’s brain leak. But he was certain Optimus hadn’t said anything about not pretending to be a guardian demon. 

A minor technicality around the rules but -

And if it would get his human to trust him…

At lightning speed Sideswipe processed more information on guardian demons: how to summon one, how to belong to one. Some of the symbols as he searched he recognized from his human’s back: a cross down his spine, a pentagram under his right shoulder blade, the word ‘Silence’ - 

He cross-referenced the information with his extensive pet database to find -

Contracts.

Human pet forums had contracts. Everything from adoption contracts, bills of sale, to setting agreed-upon boundaries to avoid… well, probably to avoid having his pet panic, try to set him on fire and escape out his window into traffic. 

Guardian demons though… also made contracts.

“I need to make a contract with you,” Sideswipe blurted.

“ _Make_ a contract?” His human drifted back, metal lighter rolling through his fingertips. “You don’t already have one.”

Sol’s heart rate increased again, and he grinned.

“Of course I have one.” Sideswipe rapidly scanned a file about pet human contracts. He could get him to sign one, thinking it’s a guardian demon contract, and then he’d get used to Sideswipe and… Sideswipe couldn’t keep the mimicking grin from his face. “But you know how these things go, we have to settle a few things, set hard limits between us.” He quoted. “I _need_ you to come when called. And to trust me.” 

He tacked on that last rule for good measure. 

“No.” His human answered, smile dropping, a hard edge to his expression. 

“What do you mean _no_?” Sideswipe’s smile dropped in time. “I’m your guardian demon. You don’t get to say no.” 

Did he get to say no?

The search of _Can human pets say no to their owners?_ spit back confusing information about pets not being children. Ew. Thank Primus. Annabelle was a mini-human and she was an extra level of vile, almost worse than babies with her sticky fingers and -

AUGH! Image search. 

Delete. Delete. Delete.

“My little Sunshine, _Sol_.” Sideswipe placated in his tone. “There are _rules_ between us now. And one of those rules is that you belong with me so I can…” Words words, how to describe the feeling of needing Sol to stay by his side where it was safe?

“So you can what?” Sol scanned over his left shoulder then locked his eyes on Sideswipe while drifting farther backward along the shaking walkway. 

“Engulf you.” Eh. Not exactly the word he needed but it was as close as he could get to the translation he wanted. “Everything else is negotiable.”

“No deal.” His human pulled down a lever and Sideswipe observed passively as black rocks rained down from above. The tiny carbon pebbles bounce off his plating, and piled up to his wheels, leaving behind a coating of fine black dust on his once perfectly polished silver plating. Ugh. The black dust clung to the red goo his pet had shot onto his plating.

“Was that supposed to scare me?” Sideswipe asked flatly.

“No.” Sol reached down and picked up a stray rock in his hand then held it between two fingers. “Carbon. One of the building blocks of organic life. Do you know how coal is formed?”

“Coal is a fossil fuel,“ Sideswipe recited his search result, “that forms from dead plant -” 

He scowled at the rocks around him.

“Ew.” 

“Yea.” Sol smirked. “Ew. Decayed plant bodies that absorbed energy from the sun millions of years ago.”

“You licked your finger!” Sideswipe’s faceplates contorted in revulsion.

“No.” Sol tossed his rock up into the air again, caught it, then he lobbed it toward Sideswipe like a grenade. It too bounced harmlessly off his plating. “I sniffed it, then spit because you are something of a germaphobe, aren’t you? Unsurprising, if you are a projection from my mind. I wanted to confirm my location. But even I’m not normally stupid enough to come into an old coal power plant. And I do a lot of stupid shit for a cheap thrill.”

Sideswipe locked his visual sensors back on his human.

“You are really starting to annoy me,” he growled out. 

“Am I?” His human grinned. “Because the best way I know to test if a hallucination is real or not is watch the way light changes as it casts a shadow, but just in case you are a demon who can’t stand a little heat, well then, I’ve got bad news for you.” He spread his arms out to the side, and his eyes flashed blue as a dark shadow fell over his face. “Apparently, I’ve got anger and violent impulse control issues with a large side of I don’t give a flying fuck, and you brought me away from people and into a fucking powder keg, you idiotic creepy-ass fucker.”

“Kitten… ” Sideswipe warned sternly, battle systems activating. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I am not your kitten. I am not your Little Sunshine. I am not a charity case or a _poor lost soul_ , because souls don’t fucking exist!” His ignition source flipped through his fingers, the lid flicked up. “I was named for the fucking sun, you demonic dickwad tosser. And if you want to know why: call me your _Sunshine_ one more time.”

A pulse: a whipping maelstrom of a burning fury tore through Sideswipe’s spark as Sol’s wet, fleshie optics glowed blue in the dark.

“ _Sol_ , please.” Sideswipe pleaded for the first time in his life. “I won’t let you get hurt. Can’t your dumb fleshie brain feel it? You need to trust me. I just want to protect you. Honest.”

“Oh, you are about eleven fucking years too late for that, _Demon Spawn._ ” Sol gave a bitter laugh. “Back then, I would have come with you in a heartbeat. But now, I know better. I can’t even afford to trust myself.” 

With that, he flicked on his lighter and tossed it. It rotated end over end into the cloud of coal dust suspended in the air around Sideswipe.

And ignited the locked-up energy absorbed from the sun, hidden and stored away millions of years ago.

Tracking the igniting plume of dust, Sideswipe’s cortex worked triple time. As the explosion roared closer, the metal of his frame rapidly shifted in and out of subspace. Engulfed in flame in his static orbital reentry transfiguration, he watched on his sensors as his human bolted out a narrow gap in the building, and slid down a rickety set of external stairs. 

Pulses of bitter agony filled his spark as Sol’s insane laughter echoed off in the distance, sounding and feeling just like Sideswipe’s on the battlefield…

Then it faded into nothingness as pockets of coal dust caught flame and the building shuddered under a second explosion.

Oh.

Sideswipe locked all his targeting systems on his moving target as chunks of the building that looked so much like Cybertron crashed down around him.

So that’s how his wonderfully scary human worked. 

Sideswipe’s human liked to activate when he played rough.

~8~8~8~8~8~8~8~

Sol’s heart was pounding in his chest as his hands caught heavy grated door that was lowering down over the counter-entrance to a streetside shop. As he heaved it back up, he met the startled expression of the shop owner.

“I’ve got money,” Sol said with ragged breath. “I just need some food.”

“I’m closing,” the larger man said as he reached to slam it back down. 

But Sol had already pulled his backpack in from of himself, and plopped it on the counter, pocket already half open. The man would have to close the grate with Sol half inside. He knew how he looked: face dripping sweat, trembling fingers, fumbling to pick up chocolate bars and slamming them on the counter. The man’s hands hesitated on the grate, trying to assess what kind of threat level Sol was. 

That hesitation was all Sol needed to pour on the charm.

“One, two, three - five.” Balancing on one foot, he flicked open the cooler with his toe wheel and pulled out a bottle of a blue sports drink... better make it two. “I really appreciate you staying open.”

Sirens echoed off in the distance, and NYPD helicopters were in the sky. The clusterfuck of honking was getting closer. Fuck. Salt. He probably needed some salt. He grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips and added it to his pile.

“I don’t care about your fucking munchies.” The store owner slapped his hand down on the counter as he protested. “I’m not open.”

“Everyone’s open for the right price.” Charming Sol, be charming. Play the crowd like selling a painting, don’t let them see through the cracks into nothing. He slapped forty dollars down onto the table, and pointedly tried not to think about that being double his food budget for the week, as he swiped his pile into his bag. “I’ll take a Zippo, and small can of fuel too.”

Sol knew he could be charming when he smiled. More than one foster home had told him he’d get adopted if he smiled more. Or at all. 

But as his lips stretched to the side, the shop owner flinched and wrinkled his nose. 

“Oh, fuck. Yea. Mouth guard.” Sol wiggled it a bit with his tongue, his words coming out garbled. “Safety first, but I’m kind of in a rush.”

His heart pounded harder as he heard the squeal of tires taking a tight turn about three blocks away. 

“You running from the cops, boy?” The shop owner pulled out his keys and fiddled with the display case lock. “I don’t have time to stick around to fill out a witness report tonight.”

“Running.” Sol nodded, best not to lie. “Not the cops. Stalker.”

The man’s eyes widened, then shook his head. 

“A boy like you has gotta stalker that’s got you on the run?” he said, then slowly looked Sol up and down. “You look like you can take care of yourself. How dangerous you talking?”

The display case of lighters was spun around and Sol went immediately for the mirrored silver. His old lighter, tossed to ignite his so-called guardian demon had been silver. Smooth, silver, like - 

His hand hesitated as his eyes caught the mirrored gold lighter next to it in parallel. His fingers trembled as he stroked down both; lightly, as if they would crumble under pressure. The edges of his vision fogged, symbols shifted and folded in a blurred sequence. Through the distortion he stared down at his hands. 

_Hands. His hands but darker; hovered over a bracelet of sterling silver and gold. The gold was like a thin shackle, made to press against the skin. The silver overlay with designs carefully cut out by hand created a recess over the gold. Combining different metallic tones; an art in itself._

_Silver is too soft to be ornamental alone. Sterling silver is an alloy: copper is added for strength. It’s not the silver that tarnishes, it’s the copper and the sulphur in our atmosphere. But I’m onto something with gold. With Argentium sterling, they added germanium for tarnish resistance. There is something better though. I can see it: gold folding into bonds charged with blue electrostatic energy and sinking into silver. With the right heat and pressure -_

_It melted onto the brick. Hours of work, lost into a gaudy slurry of slag. A drip of red onto the back of a hand._

Brown fingers ringed with gold snapped in front of Sol’s face. 

The strange hallucination of sitting at a bench in his father’s studio: banished. He had been sitting at the pulse welder, staring down at his father’s hands as if they were his own. 

His father’s hands had been darker than Sol’s, more like this man’s -

A spot of red dripped on the back of Sol’s knuckle to join the first. It was like a bucket of ice water had been dumped on his head. 

“You okay?” The shop owner peered closer, and Sol quickly wiped his nose on the back of his wrist guard. “You certain you ain’t blitzed?”

“Just a nosebleed. They happen.” Sol said it more to convince himself than the shopkeeper before him. 

The noise of his impending doom roared back into his ears, as his grasp of reality screamed at him for a check to his perceptions. 

“You see that silver car?” Sol pointed up the street. 

The man leaned forward on his counter and squinted toward the sea of yellow taxi cabs, Acuras, and Hondas. 

“Looks more black than silver, kind of charred -”

“Good.” Sol shoved the lighter fuel into his bag. “Then I’m less crazy, but no less fucked than I thought.”

By popping one wheel up on the curb, the possessed Corvette roared up the bike lane less than half a block away, and closing. 

Fuck it.

It’s not like either lighter was actually precious metal. He'd be damned if he let that fucking car ruin silver Zippos for him.

Sol met him with a glare of challenge as he zipped up his bag. 

Guess he already was damned.

“Thanks, man. Keep the change.” The silver lighter spun in his fingertips, flicked open with his ring finger only for it to complete its rotation as he snapped it shut against his palm with a click. “Close shop, because that car is about to make a scene.” 

Pushing off, Sol could feel the grit from the abandoned power plant fucking up his bearings in his wheels. Sol’d skated on worse. Like the cops were on his tail, he crossed the ten foot distance to his next checkpoint to test reality.

He didn’t have to look behind him to know the car had driven up all the way onto the sidewalk. 

He didn’t have to…

But when he reached the small entrance to New York’s subway system, Sol leaped up, knees high, turned in midair, and landed in a crouch on the railing. The worry of bloody noses being a precursor to following the path of his father melted away with his exhaustion as he locked his eyes on that car. The self-professed _Sideswipe_ came to a shrieking halt at the metal cylinders blocking his entrance. A slight uptick formed on the left side of Sol’s mouth. A warm tingling shiver raced under his skin as he slid backwards down the stairwell railing on the sides of his wheels. 

_Checkmate, motherfucker._

A low, thrumming pulse of bass, emitted by Sideswipe, shuddered deep in Sol’s chest. It reverberated through his skull down to his teeth. The sound wave pounded through every nerve like a cranked subwoofer vibrating the ground beneath his feet at a rave. It stole his breath. Dropping his hand down to stabilize himself on the railing failed. Sol was knocked off balance. Adrenaline raced through his veins as his wheels hit the edge of a step. Muscle memory kicked in as he caught his footing and rode down the remaining steps backward, wheels clacking against the tile.

It wasn’t just Sol who had felt it; that was a relief.

Pedestrians and late evening commuters shouted and cursed as the intense bass made them stumble. Once they regained their footing, in true New Yorker style, a few kicked at the car. The man in the shop had taken out a bat and was yelling at the car about being a psycho-stalker. But to Sol, it was as if reality had narrowed to just him and that car. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. A spike of vindictive challenge flared through Sol’s veins. It lit through his core, half-dreading, half-daring the demon to show himself in his true form again and follow him down here. 

The car disappeared from view as Sol descended deeper. Sol couldn’t help the sardonic cackle that bubbled out of his chest. 

It couldn’t fit. 

With a light thud, he landed on a flat, grungy tiled floor. Fine grit crunched under his wheels as he let momentum roll him backward. Cans of spray paint jabbed against his back as he bumped to a stop against a tiled wall. Sol stood like a statue, his heart thrumming as it pumped a feeling like liquid starlight through his veins. It was like being wrapped in a warm blanket. A strange itch compelled him to want to run back up the stairs and rub his victory in the demon’s face.

Errr… hood? Headlights? Where was a face on a car?

“Hey!” A woman’s voice snapped reality back like a rubber band. “You can’t wear those down here.”

The laser focus urge to run back up and taunt the demon was shattered. Sol was yanked back to the consequences of treating the city like his own personal playground. Stupid. Transit workers had a nose for detecting things out of the ordinary.

“Sorry,” Sol didn’t have to fake his panting as he got his breathing under control, rubbed at his nose again and thumbed toward the stairs. “There’s some crazy drunk trying to drive down here. I had to leap out of his way.”

As if on cue, an engine above the station roared, and the tile walls shook over the shouts. Tires squealed in place with what Sol supposed was the unwanted-guardian-demon-car equivalent of a tantrum.

The MTA worker jumped, eyes wide as she looked up the stairs. Then her face soured, eyes hard in a way Sol related with all too well: she didn’t get paid enough for the shit she had to deal with. Any potentially forthcoming fine for disorderly conduct was forgotten as she called to other transit employees then radioed for cops. Some passing people stopped and pulled out their phones, others hardly paused as they continued on with business as usual once it was clear there were no explosions or aftershocks from the vibration.

It was with the latter crowd Sol blended in. 

Squeezing the plastic clip under his chin, he undid his helmet. Tugging his backpack around to his front, Sol clipped it on a strap. Undoing a zipper, he pulled out his MetroCard, and badged through a turnstile.

Police stationed on the platform went rushing by on his right, and Sol watched them with his peripheral vision. Pulling out his phone from his pocket, he pretended he was focused on reading the screen. Years of practice had him avoiding pulling his hood up over his hair, directly looking at them, or looking away. Nothing to see here, just a regular commuter attached to their phone. Pay no attention to the backpack full of spray5 paint, assorted junk food, and lighter fuel. Definitely not being chased by demons: literal or personal. 

The literal flight from a demon as Sol avoided attracting the attention of the cops was a new one.

In his hand, the screen on his phone lit up.

Sol scowled, feeling a strange blend of sinking dread and curiosity at the number of unread messages he had from an unknown number. The latest one was telling him to come back up the steps and call off his “army of fleshies” before Sideswipe lost his patience and squashed them all to paste.

His wheel caught on the lip of a tile and he stumbled slightly. With a nervous glance toward the above-ground entrance to the station, Sol set his jaw and shoved his phone back into his pocket. Whatever. Let the police handle it. Only an idiot would want to be involved with supernatural bullshit to begin with.

Sol waited less than two minutes for the subway train to arrive. In that time he tucked his mouthguard away in a napkin, fueled his new Zippo, scarfed down two chocolate bars, and chugged back an entire bottle of one of his sports drinks. A sharp pain formed between his eyes and he pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth to break off the sensation of brain freeze. It was a trick Maya had taught him when she found him in the kitchen with his hand placed against his forehead, and a bowl of ice cream on the counter which he had attempted to scarf down and hide.

At this point, he cared less about feeding his body nutrients. What he needed to stop his muscles from shaking was refined carbs: a quick boost of energy after the psychotic direction his life had turned.

And end the gnawingly familiar sensation of hunger cramping in his stomach, making it feel like his chest was being sliced anew.

Purposefully not looking behind himself, Sol fixated on a white coffee cup sitting between the tracks. His ears he kept tuned for any screams or curses that might well up from the crowd. The compression wave in front of the train ruffled his sweat-soaked hair with a rush of stale air. The coffee cup rolled in a wobbly half-arch. The screech of metal grinding against metal drowned out his cycling thoughts, threatening to rise up as he stroked his thumb across the lighter in his pocket. 

His heart leapt as a blur of silver filled his vision along with the shrieks of metal —

— then sank as he processed the train’s arrival. 

Collapsing on a seat in the subway car, Sol tugged his hood up over his head to ward off the sense of gazing into the clouded, lifeless eyes of those around him. He hunkered down in his seat and radiated the aura of someone better left alone. The back of his neck prickled, and he found his hand drifting into his pocket. When the doors finally slid closed and the train lurched forward without a silver Corvette somehow tailing him and impossibly wedging itself into the subway car, he had expected to feel…

Victorious? Relieved?

Or at least _something_.

He had escaped and it was so… anticlimactic. The world around him and the people inhabiting this same time and place -

So mechanical. 

So routine.

So dull.

Challenging the hellspawn named Sideswipe had been a rush-and-a-half Sol was positive he wasn’t going to walk away from. He should be happy he outwitted him; denied the contract offered him. 

But instead he felt -

After bringing his foot up across his knee, he untied his skates. Digging through his bag he pulled out his one work boot, then untied its twin from his backpack. He held it in his hand and stared at it, unsettled. Sideswipe had kept this. Strapped it in like it was a cherished passenger. It had been so surreal when he’d first seen that - kind of endearing.

Then he had panicked - 

And Sol couldn’t explain it but he _knew_ Sideswipe had begun to panic when Sol lied to him and said he was losing his vision. 

_He let you go._

Sideswipe had been _scared_ , and weirdly concerned.

Sol felt - 

The boot in his hand felt like a lead weight.

He felt like something was tugging him to go -

Sol scrunched his eyes tight. An overwhelming sense of loss gripped his chest. It hurt: made it hard to breathe. Had he cracked something? A rib when his back slammed down in Sideswipe’s back -

Sol’s eyes flew open. 

A Corvette Stingray didn’t _have_ a back seat. 

The abrupt inconsistency in the detail against his memory of a tangible fact made his skin crawl. Tiny pins pricked down his spine. His hands began to shake as he stared down at the boot in his hands. How much of what he had experienced actually happened? How much could his brain distort his perceptions of reality? Could it make it seem like others around him saw something that wasn’t actually there? Had the sirens in the distance actually been after Sol - ?

He had just -

Oh fuck, had Sol actually ignited coal dust in an abandoned building - ?

The blood out his nose, like in the final days when his father started seeing -

He swiped his index finger on the bottom of his nose again. It came back dry. 

Still, Sol’s mind began to spiral and he scrambled for something tangible to anchor him to the here and now. Boots replacing his skates, and his skates firmly attached through straps on his backpack; he ignored the stiffening of his neck, and tension in his shoulders. 

Thumb sliding over the smooth cool metal of his new lighter, his heart calmed and he scowled. 

_Sideswipe’s metal was warm._

Irritably, Sol spun his lighter between his fingertips, flicking open the lid and sparking the flame in a smooth, practiced motion. Too slow. He had lost his lighter then. He’d have to break in the hinge. 

As he glared at the flame in his right hand, he quickly drew his left thumb and index finger across the base of the flame to feel the heat. The flame went out. With a snap of his finger and a shake of the lighter it was back. A simple trick, one of many he’d learned with paint and flame to pass the long hours of solitude without losing his mind.

It was all an illusion the tourists loved and it moved more paintings. But the flame never went out, it just dimmed. 

He did the motion again and again on repeat, learning the weight and feel of the metal as the lighter got cooler to match the temperature of Sol’s always cold fingers.

_Sideswipe’s metal was warm._

Snapping the lid shut along with that line of thought, he spun the lighter in a loop between his fingertips like he was drawing a gun. Covertly he glanced around the subway car. Every sense he had honed in foster homes and on the street screamed as if someone was shadowing him. He stared at the reflections of others in the dark window of the subway train. No one was paying any attention to him. As the blue lights of the tunnel streaked past amid the dark walls, the itch under his skin didn’t fade.

 _You didn’t notice Sideswipe following you._

Because Sideswipe couldn’t be real, Corvette Stingrays, even custom ones, didn’t have back seats - 

But light and shadows moved across his plating properly with the shifting location of a light source when he moved. And the transit workers had reacted to _something_.

_Would they have hurt Sideswipe? Could they hurt him? You ignited the air around him, brought part of a building down on him…_

A chill spread out from his core, and Sol simmered against it. His skin still tingled with the memory of lingering heat where the metal cables had snaked tight around his waist. Sideswipe’s creepy metal tentacle-cobras had no right to feel warm. Sol’s legs could still feel their phantom coiled pressure. 

_He saved your life. He was worried._

“Too little, too late,” Sol bitterly muttered under his breath. The skin on his back flared where Sideswipe had touched him; the smell of a hot iron held against - 

Clenching his jaw, he chased the memory away and stared out the window at nothing in the dark. 

He didn’t bother counting out the stops. Without much thought he randomly transferred trains. The destination didn’t matter yet. Being on the move and killing time was what mattered in this instant. Sol rode the subway system randomly for three hours to let crowds die down. 

At midnight Sol stepped out of the final subway car at his targeted stop in Brooklyn, hood up, with the laces of his boots trailing along the ground. 

Keeping his head slightly down and pointed to the left, he shuffled off to the side beside a pillar and knelt down. There he stalled for the time he needed. The platform cleared of the smattering of people, and he slowly started on his second lace. He listened to the footsteps: squeaky shoes and light clacks on the tile floor receded into the distance. Mindful of standing up directly behind the pillar that blocked the camera view, Sol casually walked to the north end of the platform. 

Something itched at the edge of his awareness, prickled and flared out in an internal warning. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw three red lights near the ceiling that didn’t use to be there. He rounded toward them to face them head on - and they were gone. He scanned the tunnel. Empty. He waited for a moment, on high alert, hand gripped tight around the lighter in his pocket and longing for the comfort of his switchblade. He cursed silently under his breath. He’d gotten complacent and left his hunting knife back at his apartment under his mattress. 

When he was certain he wasn’t being observed, he dropped down the ladder on the edge. The gravel crunched under his boots as he took off along the side of the active tunnel.

And he slipped off the map through the cracks, into the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm certain three red lights on a ceiling, or bleeding from a nose aren't ominous at all.


End file.
